Colour tattoo of a diving kingfisher with watercolour splashes in pink, purple and blue and black linework on the forearm, in a realistic watercolour style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Kingfisher and watercolour splashes on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A kingfisher with a long beak and blue and orange plumage dives toward the bottom of the forearm, with its wings spread. Fine black linework sketches loose shapes above it, and soft pink, purple and blue washes spread across the skin like watercolour. The bird has detailed shading and the surrounding splashes are looser and more abstract, with the subject placed low on the arm.

Realism Forearm Bird Watercolour Splashes Linework Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairi had mended the same herring net three times that winter, and still her father would not let her take the boat past the skerry. The sea below Hallan was grey as slate, and the gulls quarrelled over nothing. Then one morning a flash of colour dropped out of the mist, a bird no longer than a hand, blue on its back and orange at the breast, and it struck the water without a sound.

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The islanders said the bird was a piece of summer sky that had fallen and been taken in by the sea. Old Tam Gilleasbuig said that whoever caught one of its feathers would never drown. Mairi had no patience for that kind of talk, so she went out anyway. She watched the bird dive again and again into the shallows where the weed ran gold, each time coming up with nothing, then with a thread of silver.

She rowed in the rain with the oars slapping. Where the bird went down, the water bloomed pink and violet like dye spilt in a glass, and dark strokes of cloud drew themselves across the sky above the skerry, the shapes of wings that never quite finished. When the bird surfaced beside the boat, she reached for it, and it sat still in her palm, light as a folded letter, and looked at her with one black eye.

She did not keep the feather. She carried the bird to the rock at Hallan where the tide could reach it and set it down. "Go on, then," she said. It flew low over the water and was gone. The fishermen never believed her about the feather, but the net held every fish the boats brought in that spring, and Mairi never again asked the sea for anything it had not already offered.