A flash sheet of colourful bird designs, including swallows, parrots, a flamingo, a swan, a penguin and a phoenix, with flowers, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colour bird flash sheet

Traditional · Colour · Flash

This flash sheet shows about thirty small bird designs arranged in rows on a plain white background. The subjects include swallows, parrots, a flamingo, a swan, a penguin, a rooster, a peacock, doves and a phoenix, several paired with flowers or foliage. The linework is bold and outlined, with flat, saturated colour fills and simple highlights.

Traditional Bird Swallow Flamingo Swan Penguin Rooster Peacock Dove Phoenix Flower Hibiscus

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flash sheet had hung above the counter in the Rotterdam parlour for as long as Dolan could remember, and by the third week at sea he could have drawn every bird on it from memory. He lay in his bunk with the engine thudding through the steel and went through them like a rosary: the swallows with their forked tails, the flamingo balanced on one leg, the phoenix curling out of its own red fire. The heron sat in the bottom left corner, grey and patient, half hidden by the edge of a rose.

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Hennie, the old wiper who had worked the Cape run for thirty years, said a swallow on a sailor's chest meant he had got home from a long way off. Dolan thought that was sentimental rubbish. He wanted something that would look well on a man who had never once been sick on the galley floor. The swallow was the obvious choice, so he picked the heron instead, because it was the bird that stood motionless in the shallows and let the tide bring its dinner to it.

In Durban the parlour had a new owner and the flash was gone, painted over with a price list for sun cream. The woman behind the desk shrugged and said the heron wasn't on anything now, but she could draw one. Dolan sat on the vinyl chair for two hours while she worked from his description, the long legs, the lifted neck, the blue-grey wash across the wing. When she finished, the bird looked back at him from the mirror as if it had been waiting for the ship to dock for years.

The Bristol Channel was grey when they came home, and the heron had already begun to scab at the edges. Hennie was on the quay with a cigarette and a bag of Dolan's things. He looked at the bird for a long time and said nothing, which from Hennie was the highest praise going. Dolan turned his back to the wind and watched the gulls wheel above the cranes, and for once he didn't count them.