Coloured flash drawing of a flying pelican with outlined feathers, a koi fish, lotus flowers and irises on a pale background, in a bold neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flying pelican with koi and lotus flowers

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A pelican in flight is drawn in profile with its wing spread upwards and its long yellow bill pointing right. Its body and wing are filled with blue, teal and red feathers, irises, lily pads, white lotus flowers, a red and orange koi fish and a small dragonfly, all outlined in black. The design is shown in flat, saturated colour on a pale pink-lilac background with no body part visible.

Neo-trad Botanical Bird Lotus Iris Dragonfly Feather Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Holm Court has been broken since March, so you take the stairs with a carrier bag of pond weed in one hand and a heel of bread in the other. Nobody on the fourteenth floor remembers who set the concrete tank beside the bin chute, only that it fills with rainwater every winter and that the caretaker never bothers to drain it. This spring a boy from 22B tipped in a single koi, orange and red as a traffic cone, and somebody else floated white lilies on top of it.

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The pelican comes at dusk, up the river from the old docks, banking hard over the car park. It lands on the flat roof of the bin store with a sound like a dropped suitcase, folds its wing with the feathers gone blue at the tips, and fixes the tank with one bright yellow eye. Each evening you sit on the step with your back against the cold door and hold the bread out on your palm. Each evening it looks straight past you at the water.

On the ninth night you understand what it has been waiting for. You lift the koi out with both hands, which are shaking, and carry it up six flights to the roof, past a bicycle chained to a radiator and Mrs Okafor's cat asleep on the landing. The pelican steps forward, lowers its great bill, and takes the fish with no more fuss than a man lifting his change. Then it opens the wing wide and goes off over the estate towards the river.

You stay on the roof until the dark has swallowed the last of it. Down below, the tank holds only the moon and two white lilies, and a dragonfly has settled on the rim as though it has been there all along.