Geometric tattoo of a faceted bird in teal, green and orange with black outlines, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric bird on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A stylised bird perched side on, built from angular, faceted panels rather than curved forms. The panels are filled with teal, green and orange, with grey and black hatching and shading along parts of the body and a bold dark outline with red edging. The bird fills most of the frame against a dark, out-of-focus background, with the skin and forearm lighting clearly visible.

Geometric Forearm Bird

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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 rain's only just started and the stall-holders haven't yet thought to shout about it. You see that stall with the blue awning, the one selling bent tin kettles? Mind the puddle. Fifty years ago a woman sold birds from that very spot. Not real birds. Glass ones, cut from old shop windows and leaded together into shapes no sparrow ever had. Her name was Mrs Oduya, but everyone called her the Angle Lady, because she would never make a curve if a corner would do.

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One wet Thursday a boy came hunting for a bird to take to his mother in the hospital across the river. He had one coin and a cough that rattled like a loose shutter. She had only one bird left on the shelf: teal at the crown, green running down the wing, a streak of orange across the breast where the last of the sun had caught it. Grey hatching along the belly, as if it had been out in weather for years. She wouldn't take the coin. She told him the bird would fly if he carried it facing the river, which is the sort of thing grandmothers say, and he took it anyway, because it was the only thing on that stall he could afford to be stubborn about.

He walked the long way, over the footbridge, and the rain got down his collar, and by the time he reached the ward the bird was a cold bundle of glass in his fist. He did not know what to do with it. So he set it on the windowsill, facing the water, and the grey light came through the panels and threw teal and orange across the blankets.

His mother looked at the colours for a long time. Then she laughed, the first proper laugh in a week, and the bird threw its light across her hands. That's all the story is, really. The rain didn't stop, and nobody was cured by a bird. But she was looking at something bright, and that was enough for one afternoon.