Blue songbird tattoo with black linework and watercolour-style splashes of teal and green, on the upper arm near the shoulder.

Blue bird with watercolour splashes on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A perched songbird, shown from the side with its head turned, fills the upper arm. Dark linework and hatched feather detail define the bird, which is filled with teal and blue ink. Loose watercolour-style splashes, faint circles and a yellow-green wash spread behind it and across the tail.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the puddles, they're deeper than they look, and pull your hood tight, for the rain off the river comes in sideways on this side of the market. Now, the bluebird. You'll have seen him painted on the board above Ada Pell's stall, with the colour run down it like spilled paint. Ada dyed cloth for the whole town in a shed by the canal, and her indigo vat was the deepest in the county.

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Then the spring floods came and rotted the vat, and by the first wet week of May she had nothing to sell but grey bolts that wouldn't take a shade. The stallholders stopped buying. Ada sat on her upturned crate with her hands in her lap, and she said out loud to nobody that she'd sooner be a crow than a dyer with no blue left in her. Some sparrows heard her, or so the story goes, and a small bird with a tilted head came down from the gutters and perched on the edge of her bench.

He dipped one wing in the last dregs of the vat, shook it over the cloth, and flew up and around the market in a long loop, scattering teal across every puddle and every awning and every grey bolt on every stall. By dusk the rain itself had gone the colour of a kingfisher's back, and the whole town came out with their purses open. Ada never did learn his name.

If you walk the canal tonight, you'll still see a faint blue at the edges of the water where his shadow fell. Now pass me that cup, my throat's full of gravel and the rain's not finished yet.

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