Full colour sleeve tattoo in a Japanese and traditional style on a raised arm, showing a rose, clouds, a wave and a script banner on the forearm and upper arm.

Colour sleeve with clouds and script banner

Japanese · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A full sleeve tattoo runs from the wrist to the upper arm, with a rose near the top, clouds, a curling wave and a bird with spread wings. A ribbon banner carries script lettering across the middle of the forearm. Bold black outlines and saturated red, green, blue and yellow ink are set against the wooden beams of the background, and the wearer's head is turned away from the camera.

Japanese Traditional Forearm Upper arm Rose Cloud Wave Bird Banner Script Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swell had been running for three days when Mags Tolley hauled the last pot aboard and found a gull dead in the bait box, wings spread as if it had died mid-argument with the wind. Her father would not have it thrown over. He said a bird that came down on a boat in a blow was owed a decent burial, so she wrapped it in an old sail rag and wedged it under the thwart.

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By dusk the clouds had gone the colour of wet slate and the wave came up under the stern like a green animal with its shoulders bunched. The engine coughed and died. Her father fought the tiller while Mags bailed with a bucket that split in her hands. Off the starboard bow a red rose of light opened on the water and was gone, and she thought of the words her grandmother had painted on the transom, the ones nobody could read any more.

Then the gull moved. It came out of the rag with a rasp, shook off the canvas and rose into the spray as though it had only been waiting for the boat to stop complaining. It circled the bow twice, wings wide, and the swell flattened under it the way a sleeve smooths under a hand. Her father swore it was the gull that turned the wind. Mags knew only that the engine caught on the third pull and the harbour light swung up out of the murk.

At the quay the locker held nothing but the rag and one dark green feather, curled like a comma. Her father pinned it to the wheelhouse wall beside the faded lettering. Each season after, when the herring ran thick and the sky piled up grey, he would read the banner aloud for luck. Mags never learned what it said. She only knew the bird had not been dead, and that it had flown him home.