Watercolour-style geometric origami crane tattoo in rainbow colours with black linework on the inner forearm, beside white paper cranes.

Geometric origami crane on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm shows a geometric origami crane outlined in thin black lines, with its folded planes filled by soft rainbow washes of red, orange, yellow, green and blue. The colour bleeds outward into splashes around the bird, giving a painterly watercolour effect. White paper cranes sit blurred in the background, and a hand rests on a grey stone surface at the right of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp's warm on this side. You want to know about the paper birds, and I'll tell you, but you'll not interrupt me the way your uncle did.

Keep reading

The keeper at Skerrick Point was a man called Tobias Vane, and he had a daughter, Ida, who could fold anything. She folded napkins into swans for the wireless men and tin spoons into hares. The winter the gulls stopped coming, she sat at the kitchen table and folded a crane from a page of the shipping ledger, then another, then forty more, one for each boat that had gone past the rock and not come back. She hung them from the rail of the gallery where the wind could take them.

In March a storm came off the Forties so hard the glass in the lantern room cracked. Tobias went up with a pot of putty and a cloth, and the spray found him through the broken pane. The light went on regardless, turning, turning. Ida stood at the base of the tower with her hands full of cranes, because she had nothing else to hold, and the wind lifted them off her palms all at once, white against the black water.

When the cloud broke the next morning there was a rainbow standing in the spray off the point, so bright it looked painted on, and the paper birds were caught in the shallows, bobbing like they meant to swim home. Ida waded out in her boots and gathered every one. She dried them on the stove, one by one, and that is why, to this day, the crane is the only thing I trust to fly over this rock.

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