Colour tattoo of a blue and purple bird with spread wings and long trailing tail feathers on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue bird with long tail feathers on ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of a stylised bird with spread wings and yellow talons covers the side of the ribs. The bird is outlined in dark linework, with soft blue, purple and pale teal shading across the wings and long tail feathers. The bird fills most of the frame, with a hand and a blurred indoor background at the edges.

Neo-trad Ribs Bird Wing Feather Tail feather Talon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The king's aviary held forty-one birds the spring you were sent to scrub its cages, and only one had never been let out. It sat on a bronze perch above the north gate of Caskmoor, a blue thing with its wings half open, as if someone had stopped it mid-flight and forgotten to finish. Its talons were the colour of old brass. You were nine, and the keeper told you not to look at its tail, because the long feathers trailed past the perch and kept moving even when the air was still.

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Nobody in Caskmoor remembered who had caught it. The stories said it came in a storm off the salt marsh, dropping out of a sky the colour of a bruise, and that the queen paid for it with the last of her dowry. Each winter a new clerk swore it had grown a feather. You believed them, because you counted the feathers once, lying on the cold flags after the others had gone to supper, and lost your place at forty and started again at dawn.

When the boy king's hunt rode out and the chamberlain pointed at the perch, you were the one holding the door. He wanted the bird for the ceremony, a prize to fall silver through the smoke and be carried to the throne. You opened the latch instead and stepped back. The bird did not thank you. It walked to the sill, looked at the grey marsh and then at you, and dropped into the cold without a sound.

The next morning three long feathers lay caught in the bars of the empty cage, pale teal at the root and blue at the tip, still faintly warm. You kept one. It is folded inside the back cover of the ledger you still carry, and when the north wind rattles the shutters you lay it on the table and let it trail across the wood, slow and certain, as though it has not yet reached the ground.