Traditional style colour tattoo of a green, yellow and red bird with a swirling tail on the side of a torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful bird with swirling tail on side

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A bird with outstretched wings and a crested head is tattooed in green, yellow, blue and red, with a sweeping black-outlined tail that curls down the skin. The outlines are bold and the colour is solid with soft shading on the wings and body. The bird sits at the top of the frame with the swirl trailing below, against a plain skin background.

Traditional Ribs Bird Swirl Feather Tail

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

Sit closer, the fire is eating the last of the pine and I will not tell this twice. You want the bird with the long tail, the one your grandmothers painted on the lime walls? Good. Then listen. Her name was Itzel, daughter of the mountain cloud, and her tail was longer than the river in dry season, streaming behind her like a green ribbon pulled loose from the sky.

Keep reading

One morning the headman's son climbed the ridge to steal her eggs, and she dropped down to meet him instead. She did not scold him. She sat on a flat stone, tilted her crested head, and asked what he wanted most in the valley. He was ashamed and said nothing, so she laughed and tied one of her tail feathers to his wrist with a thread of spider silk. Whenever he told a lie, the feather curled tight as a fist. Whenever he spoke true, it unfurled and swept the dust from his sandals.

He grew old with that feather at his wrist. The valley called him the most honest man who ever lived, and he never once corrected them, because the feather did the talking for him. When he died they laid him on the ridge, and the feather was still curled, so they knew he had kept his last promise to himself.

If you climb up there at dawn, you will see a swirl of green hanging over the stone. That is her tail, still making its loop in the air, waiting for someone foolish enough to lie to her face.