Traditional colour tattoo of a blue bird beside a red and teal flower and a red and teal leaf sprig, on a leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue bird and flower on a leg

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A blue bird with an orange beak perches on a branch beside a red five-petalled flower with a yellow centre and teal leaves. A red and teal leaf sprig rises behind the bird. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with blue and grey shading on the bird's wing and body and flat colour in the flowers and leaves.

Traditional Other Bird Flower Leaf Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the sawdust, it gets into everything, the way the rain got into the big top the winter the Marvello Brothers went under. You'll want to hear about Mab Corrigan and her blue jay, because nobody else is left to tell it right.

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Mab had a jay called Pell that could fish the brass ring out of a bucket of water with his beak and drop it in the ringmaster's hat. Pell was blue as a Sunday sky, with a ruff like a bishop's collar and an orange beak he kept polished on the perch. Every night at the last show he sat on a painted branch at the edge of the ring and waited for the lamp to dim, and every night the crowd went quiet for him.

By the spring of that year there were eleven people left, and four of them were past seventy. The elephant had been sold to a zoo in Yorkshire. The strongman had gone to work in a Leeds foundry. Mab kept feeding the bird from her own plate, and when the landlord came for the wagon in April she sat on its step with Pell on her shoulder and didn't move until he'd counted the cash twice.

On the morning they pulled out, a boy from the village ran alongside the caravan holding a red flower he'd pulled from the verge, and he tossed it up to the bird. Pell caught it in his beak, circled the field three times, and came back to the hand that had raised him. That's the trick, you see. Nobody ever taught him to come back. He just decided it was home.