Watercolour style tattoo of a blue and grey bird in flight with orange splashes, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue watercolour bird on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A bird with outstretched blue and grey wings is tattooed on the side of the ribs, with its legs trailing below. The shading is soft and painterly, with loose edges and splashes of orange and pale wash across the background. Blue dominates the bird, and a hand with dark blue nail polish rests at the upper left of the frame.

Ribs Bird Wing Splash Watercolour

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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

The gull came in through the loading door at ten to four, the way it always did when Mr Okonedo left the shutter up an inch to let the heat out. I heard it before I saw it, a scrape of feet on the steel tray and then the flap of wings too big for the room. I was shaping the second batch of tins and I didn't turn round quickly enough.

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It was grey on the back and pale underneath, and when it lifted off the bench a wash of blue came off it like water off a tilted glass. The orange light from the ovens caught the edges of its wings. It knocked a tray of cooling baps to the floor and stood there in the flour, looking at me with one yellow eye as if I were the one who had broken in.

I should have shooed it out. Instead I hauled the big door open onto the yard, where the sky was still the colour of wet slate, and waited. It took its time. It walked the length of the bench, lifted its wings twice to test them, and then it was over the bins, a smear of blue against a sky just starting to thin.

By six the bakery smelled of the first loaves and the floor was swept. I found one white feather caught in the bread flour bin, and I left it there, mixed in with the rest. Mrs Adeyemi, who opens the café at seven, says gulls know when a baker has gone soft. I told her I had not gone soft. I had only let the sky in for a minute.