Colourful bird tattoo with spread wings on the upper chest, shaded in blue, red and yellow with a painterly feathered finish.

Multicoloured bird with spread wings on chest

Chest · Colour · Photo

A large bird with outstretched wings is tattooed across the upper chest, with its head facing to the side and its beak pointing left. The feathers are rendered as sharp, layered strokes that fade and splinter at the wing tips, with dark outlines and shading. Blue, teal, red and yellow inks dominate, and the design is centred on the chest with the neck and bra straps visible around it.

Chest Bird Wing Feather Phoenix

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dyer's girl of Hollin Reach had no paint to spare that winter, so she boiled her last pots with ash and river clay and hoped the king's clerk would not look too closely at the banners. He looked. He was a thin man with a ledger under each arm, and he counted the bolts twice before he found the flaw. Every colour the old kings had worn was in the valley, he said, except the red, and that was the one thing she had promised him.

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She climbed the scree that night with a bowl of madder and a brush made from a fox's tail. Above the snowline a bird sat on a dead pine with its wings folded like a shut fan. When she came near it did not fly. It turned its head, slow as a church clock, and looked at the bowl. Its feathers were dark at the edges, as if something had been burnt there long ago and had not yet cooled.

She painted it anyway, one feather at a time, dragging the bristles up through the wet tips so each stroke split and frayed into the air. Where she ran out of blue she used the sky, and where she ran out of yellow she took the last of the barley from her pocket and pressed it in. When the wings were finished she stepped back, and the bird opened them, and the colours came loose from the pine like sparks from a forge and drifted down over the roofs of Hollin Reach.

By morning every banner in the valley had taken the colour of the bird's breast. The clerk found a scarlet thread on his own cuff and could not say where it had come from, so he wrote nothing in the ledger at all, and the girl kept her madder for herself.