Realistic colour tattoo of a blue and orange bluebird perched on a branch on the inner forearm.

Bluebird perched on a branch on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bluebird with blue wings and tail and an orange breast sits on a grey branch, shown in profile facing right. The shading is soft and smooth, with fine feather detail on the wings and a dark grey outline around the feet. The tattoo is shown in a close, slightly angled photo against a white top and dark background.

Realism Forearm Bird Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the blue bird came down the cut ahead of the barges, and every spring Tom Harlow swore it was the same one. It sat on the dead ash above Stoke Lock, its wings the colour of sky after rain and its breast the orange of the stove glow through the cabin hatch. His mother said the bird meant the water would be kind that year. She said a great many things, and most of them were right about weather.

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The winter the Ellen Mary froze in at Hawkesbury, Tom's father would not let the boy walk the towpath to fetch the doctor. The ice was grey and boomed under the frost. The bird came to the ash and sang so loud the boy could not sleep for it. He followed it along the bank, step by step, and it never flew more than a few yards ahead. It led him to a gap in the reeds where a carter's grey horse had gone through the ice up to its chest and was screaming in a low, tired way.

Tom ran back for the barge rope. His father came with the pole and the two of them hauled the horse out, slow as a funeral, while the carter stood on the bank cursing the cold and then crying without shame. The carter gave the boy a shilling and a jar of quince jam, and the doctor came up the towpath at dusk with his bag swinging.

After that Tom left a crust of bread on the ash every spring, and every evening it was gone. He never saw what took it, and he never asked the bird, which would not have answered in any case.