Colour tattoo of a blue bird with a pink chest and a long scrolling tail, placed across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue bird with scrolling tail on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A blue bird with outstretched wings hovers above a long, tapering tail that curls into scrolled swirls near the bottom of the design. The linework is dark and sketchy, with blue shading on the wings and body and a pink wash on the chest. The tattoo sits centrally on a bare back, photographed from behind with the head cropped out of frame.

Neo-trad Back Bird Swirl Scroll Tail feather

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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

Ada Tennant kept the blue bird in a cage of cut hazel on the back step of Number Nine, Cinder Row, and fed it crumbs from the Sunday loaf when her brother Tom was not looking. Its breast was the pink of a cut ham rind, its wings the blue of the lamp glass in the lamp room, and it sang only when the winding engine turned. When the wheel stopped, the bird went silent, and every woman on the row knew to put down her kettle and listen.

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On the night of the fire-damp warning, the wheel stopped with a shudder that rattled the cups on the dresser. Ada heard no song. She lifted the latch of the cage, not quite meaning to, and the bird went out past the wash-house and up over the slag heap, its tail unspooling behind it in long tapering ribbons that curled and caught the lamplight at the bottom like a wave breaking.

She ran after it down the lane to the pit gate, where the banksman stood with his hands in his coat. The bird hung above the shaft head, wings held wide and not moving, and Ada understood that it was waiting for something. The banksman saw her face, then saw the bird, and took off his cap. Somewhere under the earth a hammer rang on the iron, three times, then twice.

The engine groaned and began to turn. The bird dropped its head as if to bow, then rose and was gone over the rooftops, and by morning the men were up in the yard, grey-faced and blinking, every one of them. Ada never shut a cage again. She said a bird that went out to bring the others up had earned the sky, and nobody on Cinder Row argued with her.