Black and grey brushstroke flamingo tattoo on a calf, with a small coloured piece lower down the leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Brushstroke flamingo on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A large flamingo is rendered in loose, sweeping black and grey brushstrokes, with its head curving at the top and a long thin leg reaching down to a small foot. A smaller tattoo in red, green and yellow tones sits lower down on the left of the leg, partly obscured by the flamingo's leg. The shading is soft and smoky within the strokes, and the lighter skin and plain studio floor keep the focus on the leg.

Calf Flamingo Bird Brushstroke Abstract Leg

Find an artist for this

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

You are halfway through the second letter of MARGUERITE when the skipper's boots come down the quay steps, and you keep the brush moving because a wet line left alone goes grey at the edges. Fog is lifting off the harbour in slow sheets. Behind you the fleet sits in its moorings, eleven hulls, each with a name you have painted or repainted since you were sixteen.

Keep reading

Your father taught you to load a brush by dragging it through black until the bristles were tight, then lifting, never pressing. "Press and you get a blot," he said, "lift and you get the bird." He meant the gulls. He once put a pink flamingo on his own hull, bought from a catalogue, and it never looked right against the Suffolk mud. You thought of that when the skipper asked for a bird on the Marguerite's stern and nothing else.

So you do it in black, because the water is black at four in the morning and the bird should belong to it. You lay the neck in one pull, a long curl the way a wave bows before it breaks. The body is three strokes, dry-brushed so the grain of the timber shows through like feathers. The leg is last, one thin stroke pulled down from the rail toward the waterline, and you lift the brush off the wood just before it touches.

The skipper stands on the quay and looks up for a long time. "Standing on one leg," he says. "Waiting." You wipe the brush on your jeans and tell him the other leg is under the water where nobody can see it, which is the only honest way to paint a bird that has stood in a harbour for forty years.