Blue and orange bird with geometric patterns perched on a branch, tattooed across the shoulder and upper arm in a sketchy neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric bird on a branch on shoulder

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A small songbird with a blue head, wings and tail sits on a twig that runs down the upper arm. The body is filled with orange and dark geometric panels, and the linework is loose and sketchy, with visible pencil-like strokes. The image shows a close crop of bare skin with a dark top at the edge of the frame.

Neo-trad Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Bird Branch Songbird Geometric pattern Twig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The blue bird came to the alder gate the week the mill wheel stopped, and it would not sing until somebody told it a true thing. The village tried all manner of things. The miller's wife offered her best flour. The priest recited the psalms he had been paid to forget. The bird only turned its small head and looked at the lane, where the frost had not yet lifted from the ruts.

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Tobin, the elder of the two Corran brothers, was sure he knew what the bird wanted. He stood on the stone step and told it about the price of barley, the wet year, and the many ways the world had cheated him. The bird tipped its tail and looked away. He had never been good at truth, and the bird knew it.

So Pell went into the wood with a knife, cut a green twig from the hazel, and carried it back down the lane. He sat on the wall and held the twig out, and the bird hopped onto it, its orange breast bright as a banked hearth. "It was me," Pell said, "who opened the sheep pen the night the dog was lost. I wanted Father to chase somebody other than me." The bird opened its beak and sang, a sound like a wet thumb on a glass rim, and it kept on singing until the sun was down.

In the morning the mill wheel was turning, and a green twig had been pushed through the gatepost, notched with the same small marks Pell had cut into hazel bark as a boy to count his years. Tobin walked out to see it and found his brother already there, both of them quiet for once, while the bird flew up into the alders where the lane gives out.