Blue-ink tattoo of a crested bird perched on a branch beside floral scrollwork, placed on a woman's shoulder and upper arm.

Blue bird and floral scroll on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A crested blue bird sits on a curved branch, with its long tail hanging down and its head turned to the left. Beside it, dark blue floral scrollwork with leaves and a rounded flower fills the space above the branch. The bird uses soft shading and lighter wash-like tones, while the foliage is in stronger, denser blue, and the image is framed on the upper back and shoulder against a plain background.

Botanical Shoulder Bird Branch Flower Scrollwork Leaves

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the cat, she thinks the rocking chair is hers. Now, the blue bird. You'll have seen it painted over the mantel in Mrs Pellow's back parlour, the crested one with the tail like a dropped ribbon. Her husband brought the tray home from Scheveningen in nineteen twelve, and it hung in that house for thirty years before anybody thought to ask what the bird was saying.

Keep reading

Mrs Pellow kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Steps, six rooms and a sea view you had to lean out of the window to get. Every summer a travelling man who sold sewing machines took the room under that tray, and every evening he sat in the window and told the bird his troubles. The bird never answered. It only turned its head, the way it does, looking back over its shoulder as if it had heard something in the next room.

The winter the herring failed, Mrs Pellow found a letter tucked behind the tray, in a hand she didn't know, addressed to nobody. It said the writer was leaving the coast for the hills and would not be coming back, and that the bird had been the only one who ever listened. She read it twice, put the kettle on, and wrote a reply on the back of a rent book, which is the only letter I ever knew her to send.

She folded the reply into a paper boat and set it on the bath water, and it sailed, as far as anyone could tell, straight out past the harbour wall. Some say the flowers curling round that branch are the very ones she painted on the lid of the tin, that the bird was only ever waiting for somebody to ask it a question. Drink your tea. The cat has your chair now.