Colour tattoo of a kestrel perched on a branch with peonies and poppies in a neo-traditional style, across a person's upper back and shoulder.

Kestrel and peonies across a shoulder blade

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A kestrel perches on a leafy branch on the upper back, with large pink peonies, two peach-coloured poppy-like flowers and green leaves arranged around it. The bird is rendered with soft shading and fine feather detail, while the flowers use layered petals with dark outlines. The colours are muted pinks, peaches, greens and greys on lightly shaded skin, with the design wrapping over the shoulder.

Neo-trad Botanical Back Shoulder Bird Peony Poppy Flower Leaves Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kestrel would only step onto my glove when the wind came off the Humber, so that was where I took her on the last morning of the Lusk Brothers' Travelling Show. Behind us the big top lay in grey heaps on the car park at Hessle, and the banners we had carried for thirty years were rolled on the flatbed like wet sails, their painted peonies cracked and blooming with damp.

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Mr Lusk had sold the elephants in March and the horses in June. Pip was the last thing left that people still paid to see, though they paid less every year, and she had never once flown for a man with a clipboard. She knew my whistle, the low two notes Dad taught me before his knees gave out. I slipped the leather hood off and felt her weigh the air.

She went up in a wide, impatient circle, cleared the hedge and dropped onto a hawthorn at the field's edge. I waited with the jesses coiled in my fist. Mr Lusk shouted from the cab that the buyer's man was due at noon. I shouted back that the bird was thinking. He did not argue, which told me he had heard it too, the long quiet of something deciding.

She came back once, a stoop out of the sky so fast the air cracked, and landed on my wrist hard enough to bruise. Then she lifted again, looked down at the lorry, the torn canvas and the peony banners, and let the wind take her south over the stubble. I stood there until she was a single dark mark, then nothing. Back at the flatbed a few petals had fallen from the banner onto the tarpaulin, pink as sugared almonds, and I left them lying where they were.