Colour realism tattoo of a mallard duck with spread wings in flight, with a green head and blue wing patch, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mallard duck in flight on an arm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A mallard duck in mid-flight with its wings spread upward and its head turned to the right. The feathers are rendered with soft grey and cream shading and fine detail, with a bold dark outline. Green head, blue wing patch, brown chest and orange feet provide the main colour against the grey and tan wings.

Realism Forearm Bird Wing Feather Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The drake came to the railing of Harrow House every morning once the bread van had gone past, and every morning Nana Gill put out a heel of loaf on the sill. Nobody on the ninth floor could say where he slept. The lift men swore he went down the shaft at night and out through the grate to the canal. The children said he was a prince under a spell, which is the sort of thing children say when nobody has given them a better story.

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One winter the wind came up the stairwell so hard it took the washing off every line in the block. Nana Gill's coat went with it. She was ninety-one and would not be carried, so she sat on the sill with her knees against the cold and waited. He came down out of the grey with his wings thrown up like a man stopping a door, and he looked at her with one bright eye the colour of a conker.

He did not take the bread. He tipped his head towards the canal, then towards the stair, then opened his wings and dropped low over the car park, the blue flash on his wing showing like a window lit from behind. Nana Gill followed him down nine flights on her own two feet, which she told everyone afterwards was the last thing she did without a stick. At the bottom the water was black and steaming, and the drake sat on the one unfrozen patch with his orange feet tucked under him, waiting for her to catch up.

She fed him the last of the loaf there. When the lift men found her coat tangled on the railing the next morning, they said the wind had carried it off like everything else. Nana Gill never argued. She left the ninth-floor window open all that spring, and the drake came back each morning to see whether she had changed her mind.