Colour Japanese style tattoo on an upper arm showing a crane in flight, a red sun, grey clouds, waves and orange and red maple leaves.

Crane, red sun and clouds on an upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large crane flies across the upper arm, with its wings and tail feathers outlined in black and shaded in blue-grey. A red sun sits in the top half of the design, surrounded by stylised grey clouds, dark wave bands and scattered orange and red maple leaves. The solid black background and layered grey shading give the composition depth, and the photograph is taken in daylight from the side.

Japanese Upper arm Crane Sun Cloud Maple leaves Wave Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put the kettle down, Tamsin, and listen, because the crane does not wait on anyone who is fussing with tea. Out past the drowned spires of Old Wrexham, where the sea has swallowed the ring road, the cloud rolls in grey curls every morning like wool off a carder. Through it the sun comes up red as a lamp behind a sheet, and that was the year the leaves came back.

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The leaves came from the glasshouse on Hob's Tower, where Ruth Falconer had kept a single maple alive in a tin of loam since before the water. Her grandson Pim climbed the spire every autumn with a basket and pressed the leaves flat between wax paper, and the salvage traders paid him in tinned peaches and copper wire. He was up there one grey noon when the crane came low over the waves, its wings blue-grey on the underside like a gull's back in rain, its long legs trailing like a pair of oars. It did not look at him. It looked down at the water, where the dark bands of the swell ran in rows like ploughland.

Pim took the skiff out after it, though his grandmother screamed from the glasshouse door. He found the bird tangled in a snarl of old fishing line, one wing folded wrong, and he cut it free with the wire-snips from his own pocket. The crane lifted, heavy at first, then clean, and rose straight towards the red sun until the cloud swallowed both of them. A single feather came down and landed in the skiff, and Pim took it home and pressed it in wax paper like a leaf.

So that is why the maples on the tower are red in the wrong months, and why the old fishermen will not row through the grey cloud at dawn. Now you tell me what the sea owes a boy who gave a bird back its sky, and then you can make your tea.