Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a blue bird with spread wings holding a green ribbon in its beak, placed on the upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue bird with green ribbon on chest

Neo-trad · Chest · Colour · Photo

A stylised blue bird with spread wings holds a green ribbon in its beak, with a second green ribbon curling up behind it. The design has bold dark outlines, with blue and green shading that gives the feathers and ribbons some depth and a glossy finish. It sits centrally on the upper chest near the collarbone, against a plain background of skin and dark clothing.

Neo-trad Chest Bird Ribbon Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird came down onto the cabin roof the morning after the flood had gone back between the banks, a strip of green cloth hanging from its beak. Nell Garrow was scraping mud from the tiller when she saw it, and she did not drop the scraper, because her father had always said a bargeman who drops his tools has already lost the river. "Whose are you?" she asked. The bird only turned its head, one eye bright as a wet stone, and laid the ribbon at her feet.

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Her father had taken the coal boat down through the locks at Stourport three weeks before and had not come back up them. The lock-keeper said the water took him near the weir. Nell had stopped watching the landing, but she still tied the bow line each evening the way he taught her, two loops and a half hitch, so the boat would ride true if he came in the dark.

The ribbon was long enough to tie the barge to the bank twice over. She wound it round the mooring post, and the bird sat on the rail and watched her do it. When she finished, it lifted and flew upriver, low over the water, the second ribbon trailing from its tail and unspooling over the reeds as if it meant to reach the sea. Nell followed for nine days, poling where the bank was shallow.

On the tenth day she came to a bend where a grey heron stood in the shallows with a green ribbon snagged in its legs. Beyond it, on a willow snag, her father's cap hung dripping, and tucked under the cap was a small tin box with a note inside: Tie it true, Nell. I am only a little way on.