Realistic colour tattoo of a magpie perched on a branch with a red ribbon and an antique key, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Magpie and key on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A magpie with glossy black and blue plumage and white belly feathers perches on a bare branch, with a red ribbon curling behind it. An ornate antique key hangs below the branch, rendered in brown and bronze tones. The shading is smooth and detailed against a pale blue wash, and the tattoo fills the frame across the flank.

Realism Ribs Bird Branch Ribbon Key

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the stair, it's missing three steps and the fourth is a liar. Sit where the wall still holds some warmth. Right. You want the magpie, not the king, because the king was only ever a draught in a cold hall.

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Lord Aldous Feverel kept his keys on a red silk ribbon, the way a man keeps a lover he does not trust. Each night he hung them on the bare ash branch outside his tower window while he ate his pottage, and each night the magpie watched from the same branch with its black coat buttoned to the throat. The castle's great door had a lock as tall as a child and a key as long as a forearm, bronze gone the colour of old tea, its bow worked into a knot of leaves. That key was the only thing in Thornbury worth stealing, and the magpie knew it, the way clever things know about shine.

One Michaelmas the wind came off the moor and cut the ribbon loose. The key fell past the ivy and snagged on the old ash, and the magpie came down on it like a thief at a wedding. It carried the key a mile across the bog, past the mill and the chapel and the lamp-lit inn, and dropped it at last on the stones of the ruined north wall, where the door had never been and the gate had long since rotted away.

Nobody came for the key. The king's men never climbed that far. But the wall, they say, has been opening ever since, and the magpie sits on it at dusk, ribbon trailing red as a wound, waiting for someone foolish enough to pick the lock. Mind yourself. Mind the stair.