Realistic colour tattoo of a goldfinch in flight on an upper arm, with black and white wings and a yellow body, above a faint outlined leaf design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Goldfinch in flight on an arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A goldfinch with black and white wings and a yellow breast is shown mid-flight, with a black cap and a small branch under its feet. The bird is rendered with smooth shading and fine feather detail, using yellow, black, white and grey ink. Pale outlined leaves and flowers sit below it on the skin, and the blurred background shows fabric.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's loose, same as the rest of this town. Now where was I. Ah, the finch. Sit still and I'll tell you how the goldfinch came to Porthkerran, because nobody who was there has the nerve to tell it right anymore.

Keep reading

Ada Penrose kept the signal hut at the end of the quay, and in the spring of the bad winter her brother's boat went out past the Mewstone and did not come back by dark. There was no telephone to the lifeboat station then, only the lamp and a girl who could not stop her hands from shaking. Her brother had a goldfinch in a wicker cage, a little yellow-breasted thing with a black cap like a bishop's skullcap, and he had promised to bring it home on the Thursday for her birthday.

She opened the cage at dusk and let it go over the water. Everyone laughed at her. Goldfinches don't fly at night, they said, and it was blowing a gale. But the bird went up off the rail with its wings wide, black and white against the cloud, and it flew out to the Mewstone and came back with a sprig of broken birch in its feet and dropped it at her boots. Eleven minutes later the lamp on the boat answered hers.

Ada still has the twig, pressed flat in a Bible in the chapel. Her brother never did get his birthday present. He sends a postcard from Lisbon every Christmas with a yellow bird on the front and nothing written inside but her name.

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