Blue ink tattoo of a long-tailed bird and peony-style flowers running along a forearm, in a Japanese-influenced botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue bird and flowers on an arm

Japanese · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bird with a long flowing tail sits above a cluster of large flowers and leaves, all in shades of blue on a forearm. The linework is smooth and the blue is shaded with soft gradients, giving the flowers a rounded, layered look. The design wraps across the arm diagonally, with a small line of marks near the elbow and the arm filling most of the frame against a blurred background.

Japanese Botanical Forearm Bird Flower Peony Leaves Swallow

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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

Dear Pauline, I nearly didn't send back the reply card. Then this morning I found the blue and white jug from Mrs Tanner's kitchen wrapped in a tea towel at the back of the airing cupboard, and it put me in mind of the Saturday we spent washing up at the Ellis Tea Rooms, sleeves rolled to the elbow, arguing over whether the bird on the plates was a swallow or a magpie with ideas above its station.

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You always said swallow, because you'd seen one nesting under the gutter of the Co-op. I said nobody paints a swallow with a tail like that unless they've never seen one. Mr Harrold, who owned the place, told us to stop nattering and dry the peonies properly, because a chipped flower cost him a shilling and a chipped girl cost us our Saturday pay. We laughed so hard we dropped a saucer. It didn't break, which Mr Harrold said was the only miracle he'd witnessed in thirty years.

So I'm coming to the reunion on the fourteenth, bringing the jug, and I expect you to tell me which of us was right. Bring the photograph of the girls squinting outside the Ellis, the one where your hair has gone flat in the wind. I'd like to see your face when I hold the jug up to the light and the bird's tail is still exactly where we left it.

Love, Maureen. P.S. Mr Harrold's son has the shop now and sells phone cases with the same birds on them. Make of that what you will.