Blue shaded tattoo of a crested bird on a branch beside a floral scroll design, on the forearm of a person wearing a light blue denim shirt.

Blue bird and floral scrollwork on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A crested bird perches on a curved branch beside a dense floral ornament with scrolling leaves and layered blossoms. The linework is fine and the forms are shaded in several tones of blue, giving depth to the feathers and petals. The tattoo is shown on a bent forearm against a pale painted brick wall, with the sitter's denim sleeve rolled up.

Forearm Bird Branch Flower Scroll Foliage Filigree

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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

Pull your stools in, all of you, and mind the draught from the door, because the snow has found the latch again and I'll not tell this twice. When the drifts reach the sills, the pass shuts for a month, and this inn has held more strangers than any hearth in the valley. My grandmother's grandmother kept it first, and she swore the road was closed by a bird that sat on her kitchen dresser, painted on a plate no wider than a supper bowl.

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The plate came from a potter called Anselm Varr, who worked a kiln down by the river where the water never froze. He had a daughter, Ilse, who could not sleep for the cold, so she sat up nights with her brushes. She gave the bird a crest like a sprung lid and a long tail that curled round its branch like a question mark. Around it she painted ferns and blossoms, layer over layer of blue, until the petals looked deeper than the glaze they sat in.

One February the snow came so thick the church bells froze in their frames. Ilse set the finished plate on the sill to dry, and the village heard a bird singing from it, low and sweet, the way a kettle sings just before it boils. Nobody could open a door against the drift, but every time the bird sang the snow thinned by the width of a hand. Men dug a path by that song for three days, and the wagons got through. The old people said a song like that has to be paid for, and it was paid by the girl who painted the bird, who was never quite warm again.

The next morning the sill was bare except for a single fresh blossom where the bird had sat, painted in a blue no kiln in the valley could match. Her father kept the plate on the dresser and never painted again. It is still above the bar, if you squint past the ale pumps, and on a night like this you can hear it, if you are quiet enough, once the snow has stopped.