Colour realism tattoo of a blue and orange bluebird perched on a branch, on the inner wrist.

Bluebird perched on a branch on the wrist

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bluebird with a blue head and wings and an orange breast sits on a pale orange branch. The soft shading gives the feathers and body volume, with dark grey outlines defining the shapes. Colour ink dominates the composition, which is centred on the inner wrist against a plain skin background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Above the Caddan pass, where the road gave up and became two ruts in the heather, a shepherd's widow named Orla kept forty ewes and one blue bird that would not leave her. Nobody in the valley could say where it had come from. It sat on the same grey branch of the rowan by her door every morning, its breast the colour of a banked fire, and it watched the path.

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In the hard winter the snow closed the pass, her son Tam went up after a strayed ewe and did not come down. The men of the village searched for three days. On the fourth, Orla climbed alone with a loaf in her apron and a lantern she could barely keep lit. She talked to the bird as she went, because it was the only company she had, and it flew ahead of her from fence post to cairn, always stopping where the drift was thinnest.

She found Tam in a hollow below the cornice, cold but breathing, his leg bound with his own scarf against a crook of ash. The bird landed on the stone beside his head and sang one short phrase, and Orla followed the rising note down the far side of the ridge to a shepherd's hut the men had forgotten was there.

They carried him down in spring, when the ewes were already lambing. Orla never again crossed the pass without a crust in her pocket. The bird stayed on the rowan until she died, and the valley still says that a bluebird on a branch means the road is open.

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