Two blue wing tattoos sit on the upper chest of a woman in a white pearl-studded dress, with a colourful sleeve on her upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue wings on the upper chest

Chest · Colour · Photo

A pair of blue wing tattoos sits symmetrically across the upper chest and collarbone area, with feathered, outlined shapes that taper towards the centre. A colourful sleeve tattoo with yellow, teal and pink tones covers the upper arm on the left, and a dark outlined design is partly visible on the right shoulder. The shot is framed tightly from the lower face to the chest, with a soft-focus veil and a white dress in the foreground.

Chest Shoulder Upper arm Wing Bird Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, and mind the peat smoke, because this is the part where the sea starts listening. Eilean Mhor had three hundred people and one harbour, and every October the kittiwakes came down off the cliffs in a grey argument and settled on the pier posts as if they owned them. Nobody minded. Old Ruairidh Gunn always said a bird that lands on your rail is a message you haven't read yet.

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His daughter Catriona painted the wings. She was eleven and had no paint but the blue for her father's boat, the Morning Star, so she mixed it with lamp oil and a dab of her mother's bluing and went at the bow with a hog-hair brush. She did two wings, spread wide, the feathers narrowing toward the middle of the wood where the stem curves, so they nearly met like a pair of hands in prayer. Her father laughed and said one squall would wash them off.

The squall came in March. The Morning Star went out on a morning as flat as a plate and did not come back by dusk. At first light the men found her drifting upright past the Skerry, her rope trailing from the stem, and her father lying in the bottom boards with cold hands and a fish still in his fist. He said the gulls had kept circling him all night, and that when the light went he had been sure he was dead until a blue wing came down over the rail.

Every autumn since, the kittiwakes fold their wings on the pier in exactly the shape Catriona gave the boat, tips out, narrowing to the middle. Ruairidh would stop there and tap his pipe on the settle. Go down at dusk and look for yourselves, he'd say. Just don't tell Catriona I said it was the birds. She'd want the credit.