Colourful sketch-style bird tattoo with black linework and watercolour-like splashes across the ribs and side of a bare back.

Multicoloured sketch-style bird on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A bird, likely a phoenix or similar flying creature, is drawn with loose black linework and filled with red, orange, yellow, green and blue washes. Splashes of colour spread around the wings, and the feathers are rendered as loose, sketchy strokes. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso, photographed against a plain grey background with a patterned fabric draped at the left edge.

Ribs Bird Phoenix Feather Splashes Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Penrose kept her brushes in a biscuit tin and her paints in jam jars along the sill of the top floor flat above the dye works on Sallow Street. Every night after the last tram had clanged home, the windows across the city went dark one by one, and the bird came down over the chimneys, trailing colour the way a wet brush trails water.

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Nobody believed her when she said it was made of loose lines and spilt paint. Her landlord said it was soot. The constable said it was gas. But each morning the vats in the yard below ran a shade no dyer had mixed, red going to gold at the edges, and the washing lines were fringed with blue that rubbed off on the hands.

In November a dyer's boy called Eli Frank climbed the fire escape with a sack. The mill owner had sent him to take a feather, because a colour like that would sell in every shop from here to the coast. Mags did not stop him. She sat on the parapet with her brush while the bird settled beside her and opened its wings, each stroke ending in the air where a feather should have finished.

Eli reached for one. Mags shook her head. A feather taken is a line with no end, she said, and no dyer can use a line with no end. So Eli put the sack down and took her brush instead, and painted the one splash that was missing on the wall of the yard. When he came down the ladder the bird had gone, and the vats in the morning were grey as wet slate. Eli's fingers stayed blue for the rest of his life.