A blue songbird perched on a branch with blue and black floral scrollwork, tattooed on a woman's shoulder.

Blue bird and floral branch on a shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A bird with a crested head and long tail sits on a curving branch, beside a cluster of stylised flowers and leaves. The bird is shaded in layered blues with soft tonal transitions, while the flowers and fern-like foliage use darker blue and black. The tattoo sits on the upper shoulder against a plain light background, with lace fabric visible on the right.

Shoulder Bird Songbird Branch Flower Floral Foliage Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cobalt had gone grey in the kiln again, and Marijke knew before she lifted the plate that the bird would come out looking like a wet rook. Her uncle set the tray on the bench without a word, which was his way of saying he had seen the same fault three times that week and was tired of seeing it.

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By late August the pear trees along the Schiedam road were dropping fruit faster than the pickers could gather it, and wasps worked the windfalls in the long grass. Marijke carried the cooling tiles out under the nearest tree and sat with her back against the trunk. The pattern book lay open on her knee, all tidy scrolls and stiff little flowers, and beside it she had a finch she had watched that morning: a crest lifted like a sudden thought, a tail that ran on past the branch as if it had somewhere better to be.

She put the book face down in the grass. Then she painted the bird the way she had seen it, crest up, tail long and wrong against every rule her uncle had taught her, and let the leaves curl around it in the dark blue that never quite sat still in the kiln. When the sun dropped behind the orchard wall, a widow who bought for the shipping houses stopped her cart at the gate, held the plate to the last of the light, and asked whether the bird was about to fly off the edge.

Marijke said it had been waiting to, and the widow paid double. Her uncle counted the coins twice and said nothing, but that night he hung the plate on the nail beside the workshop door, where the morning light from the orchard would reach it first.