Colour tattoo of a bird with spread wings in pink, yellow and blue, shown on the calf of a leg with flip flops at the top of the frame.

Colourful bird in flight on a lower leg

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A bird with wings fully spread is shown in flight across the lower leg, with its body angled toward the ankle. The feathers are rendered with defined outlines, layered shading and gradients moving from pink and yellow to blue and green. The subject fills the centre of the frame against a grey concrete background, with a foot in a flip flop visible at the top and bottom.

Neo-trad Calf Bird Wing Feather Flight

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

By the third week out of Valparaíso the parrot had stopped calling your name and started calling the cook's, which the cook took as an insult. You don't mind. You have spent eleven months on the Halcyon Dawn learning that a ship is a small country where everyone is owed something and nobody has the change. Solace, the bird the old steward bought off a fisherman at the harbour, all rose and saffron and sea-green, sits on the galley hatch rail and watches the horizon as though it has left something behind there.

Keep reading

The squall comes up at four bells in the middle watch, black as slate and twice as hard. Rain goes sideways. Somebody shouts about the jib, somebody else about the boy who went over the rail, and in the noise the galley door bangs open and the cage swings loose. You see the flash of it before you hear it: a wing opening wider than any wing should, pink and yellow, then the blue-green underside catching the lantern light as it rises past the mainmast.

You climb after it. The ratlines are slick and the wind wants you off them, and you tell yourself you are only doing your job. At the crosstrees the bird waits, perched on the yard as if it had booked the spot. It looks down at the grey water, then at you, then back at the water. You understand then that it was never lost. It has been counting the days since the last landfall, and it knows which way the land lies better than the chart does.

When the squall passes you stand at the rail with the empty cage in your hand. Solace lifts off without a sound and banks once over the wake, wings spread across the pale morning, then turns east towards a coast none of you can see yet. You are still watching long after it has gone, and somebody below is shouting for the watch to be changed.