Realistic colour tattoo of a red cardinal perched on a brown branch with green leaves, on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cardinal on a branch on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A red cardinal perches on a brown branch with two green leaves, with its tail feathers extending up and to the right. The bird has detailed feather shading in red and brown tones, a black face patch and an orange beak. The background is softly blurred, showing a dark garment, a pale fabric and a black pi-shaped symbol tattoo at the lower left edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Thursday, 13 February. The Calder Star came in on the morning tide with timber from Norfolk, Virginia, and a passenger nobody had booked. Dad found it on the forward hatch cover, a cardinal the colour of a pillar box, puffed up against the drizzle and too tired to mind us.

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Mr Okafor, the mate, swore it had been blown clean across the Atlantic and would be dead by dinner. It wasn't. It ate crumbs from my chip paper, hopped along the bollards, and when the crew went ashore it perched on the boom and watched the gulls as if it were waiting for a bus.

I took it home in a shoebox with holes punched in the lid and a saucer of chopped apple. Mum said we were not keeping a wild thing in the airing cupboard, so it lived on my bedroom windowsill instead, and for three days that grey room on Carrick Lane was the brightest thing in the street. Every evening I tried to picture the colours of the country it had come from, and I couldn't.

The Calder Star sailed on the evening tide. I stood on the harbour wall with the empty box under my arm. Just before the gangway came up, the cardinal dropped out of the rigging, crossed the water in a short red line and landed on the sycamore at the top of the steps, where it sat looking down at the ship as if it had only been visiting. The ship went out past the breakwater. The bird stayed.

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