Colourful geometric bird tattoo with watercolour splashes on the top of a foot, against a red background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric bird with watercolour splashes on a foot

Geometric · Other · Colour · Photo

A songbird perched on a branch is shown in faceted, angular shapes filled with blue, teal, red, pink and cream. Dark brown and red wash-like splashes sit behind and below the bird, and a red watercolour smear runs across the upper background. The tattoo sits on the top of a foot, with the toes visible at the bottom edge of the frame.

Geometric Other Bird Songbird Watercolour splash Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird came aboard in the grey before dawn, when the trawl was still streaming up out of the water and nobody had yet said a word about the weather. Eilidh Strachan saw it first, perched on the gallows block with its head cocked, a small thing cut into facets of teal, blue and rust, as if someone had smashed a stained-glass window and glued the pieces back in the wrong order. Its legs were pink. Pink, on a bird that size, forty miles out from Skerrow in February.

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Donald Reid, skipper of the Morning Star for thirty-one years, said it was a chaffinch blown off the mainland and would be dead by noon. The bird did not die. It walked the rail in small deliberate steps, stopped at the ice-crusted winch to peck at a sliver of bait, then turned its head again and again towards the north-west, where Skerrow Point would be if the spray let anyone see it. Eilidh's gran used to say that a sensible crew never shooed a bird off a boat, so Eilidh kept her hands in her pockets and her mouth shut, which was sensible too.

They hauled the last of the catch without talking. Halfway up, the net snagged on something heavier than fish, and when Donald cut it free a yellow creel buoy bobbed up with an old name half-scraped from its side. He looked at it for a long time before he tossed it back over the rail. Behind him the bird lifted, circled the mast once, and settled again, as though it had counted the crew and found everyone present.

By the time they tied up under the harbour wall the rain was coming in sideways and the bird was sitting on the bollard at the end of the pier, water beading on its faceted back like light through glass. Eilidh looked away to coil a rope. When she looked again the bollard was only a bollard, wet and black. She found she had stopped shivering, and she could not have said when that had happened.