Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue jay perched on a branch

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A blue jay sits side-on on a thin branch, with its tail hanging down the leg. The feathers are shaded with smooth gradients of blue, white and black, and the bird's head and crest are detailed. Colour dominates the composition against the plain skin tone of the leg.

Realism Calf Bird Branch Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Edwin had been the one to find the jay, though the abbot would say it was the jay that found us. It came to the scriptorium sill in the second week of February, when the frost had made the cloister flags grey as slate and the only colour left in the valley was the green of the holly by the gate. I was told to chase it off with a broom. Instead I sat down on the step and watched it turn its head, first one eye, then the other, as though it were reading the room.

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Brother Cuthbert, who kept the sheep and disapproved of most things, said the bird had come for the walnuts we stored in the loft. He was right, and it took three of them before breakfast. Father Ambrose forbade feeding it. "Birds belong to God," he said, "not to the refectory." Each morning after that I left a single walnut on the sill and pretended I had forgotten it, and each morning it was gone.

The Psalter for the Feast of St Hilda was given to me that spring, a commission I had begged for and dreaded in equal measure. The border of the Beatus page required a bird of some kind, and I found I could not draw any bird but this one. I mixed lapis with a little white lead, the blue so hard it looked wet, and laid it on in thin washes over the grey underdrawing, feather by feather, while the tail spilled down the margin toward the initial.

When Ambrose came to inspect the work he stood a long time before the page. Then he asked whether the bird had been drawn from life or from memory. I told him it had been drawn from a walnut. He laughed, which I had never heard him do, and said the Psalter could keep its jay. The next morning the sill was empty, but there was a fresh blue feather caught in the frost on the outside of the glass.