Realistic colour tattoo of a blue jay with spread wings on the side of a person's torso above the hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue jay in flight on the side

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A blue jay in mid-flight, shown in profile with wings spread wide, covers the side of the torso. The feathers are rendered with fine, layered linework and soft blended shading in blues, greys and white highlights. The bird is set diagonally across the skin, with the wingtips reaching toward the back and the front of the body.

Realism Other Bird Wing Feather Flight

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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

Shut the door properly, Tom, or the wind will have the lot of us out to sea. Sit where I can see you. There. That chair was my husband's, and he never once sat in it without complaining about the springs.

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The bird came in off the Lucinda in the spring of nineteen-twelve, or thirteen, I was never good with years. Captain Harrow had a crate of Nova Scotia apples lashed on the foredeck, and somewhere between the banks and the Bristol Channel a jay got into the rigging and decided it liked the look of the ship. Blue as a Sunday plate it was, with a crest up like a fishwife's hat. Nobody could get it down. Harrow swore it talked to him in the night.

It came ashore at Penhallow Quay in a fish basket, wings out, cross as you like, and it took the whole of our back parlour for its own. Forty guests and not one could take their tea without a blue flash going past the window. My mother said it was a bad omen. My father said it was a good one that had come the wrong way round. What it wanted, I found out in June, was the sea. It sat on the rail each evening, facing out, wings open as if it were drying them, waiting for something to come up on the tide.

The morning after the big gale, the rail was empty. The basket was still by the stove. On the wet sand below the cliff steps lay two long blue feathers, side by side, pointing at the horizon, the way you'd set down a pair of gloves for someone who'd gone on ahead. I kept one. The other I gave to Captain Harrow, who put it in his hat and never once took it out.