Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a cartoon bird wearing a purple bow with a small skull, with feathers and music notes, on the upper arm.

Colourful cartoon bird on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large cartoon bird with big expressive eyes, a pink head and an open beak sits on the upper arm, wearing a purple bow with a small skull and a ruff of orange, red and teal feathers. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with smooth colour shading in pink, purple, teal and orange. Two music notes and an orange cluster at the base balance the composition against the curve of the arm.

Neo-trad Upper arm Bird Skull Bow Feather Music note Cartoon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't you lean on that ladder, the top rungs are soft as my grandmother's bread. Now, the bird. Her name was Tuesday Pinch, and she wore a purple bow the size of a cartwheel because a fair man had told her it made her look like a lady.

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She lived in the old Bramley tree at the bottom of Lower Barrow orchard, where the apples were going russet and the wasps were drunk on the windfalls. Every evening she sang from the highest branch, notes that dropped down through the leaves like pennies into a jar. One August a painted caravan rattled up the lane, its door handle shaped like a little skull, and the showman heard her from the gate. He offered her a place on his wagon, a spangled cage with the door left open.

She went. Three seasons she sang for crowds in Hereford and Market Drayton, her orange ruff puffed out like a sunrise over the big top. But the tunes they wanted got thinner, bought by the yard from a man in a waistcoat, and her feathers went dull under the lamps. When she asked for her wages in plums, the showman laughed so hard he dropped his pipe.

So she came home one September and sat on the Bramley again. The windfalls had rotted sweet and the wasps had gone quiet. She sang the one note she had kept back, a little flat, and the orchard heard it. If you climb up there at dusk, you'll hear it still, and you'll know it is hers.