Colour tattoo of an ornate swirling bird across a person's upper back, with a colourful sleeve on the arm of the person embracing them, including a skull and roses.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate bird on back and skull sleeve on arm

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of two people embracing, showing a bare upper back with a large colour tattoo of a stylised bird with swirling, paisley-like ornament and leaf shapes. The arm wrapped around the figure carries a dense sleeve with a skull, red roses, an owl and a scroll banner. Warm, soft lighting and the tight crop keep the focus on the inked skin.

Traditional Neo-trad Back Forearm Upper arm Bird Swirl Skull Rose Owl Banner Leaves

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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

Brother Anselm gave me the gall-ink the week before the abbot's visitor arrived and told me to keep my margins quiet. I have never once kept a margin quiet. The psalter for the chapter house was all grey vellum and careful lines, and on every page I finished I left a little room at the foot for something that would not be prayed over.

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The bird came first, a long-necked thing I painted in the outer margin of the Lauds page, its tail unspooling into the kind of paisley curls the Bristol merchants talked about that spring. I gave it leaves for feathers. Brother Anselm found it and said nothing, which in our house is a sort of blessing. Then I did the skull beside the rose, and the owl perched on the scroll, and the scroll I filled with a verse I will not write down, because it was about the abbot's cook.

By Michaelmas the whole margin had grown into a crowded little kingdom. The visitor, a thin man with a silver watch that he kept checking against the bell, stopped at the page and read the scroll twice. He did not laugh. He turned the leaf over and asked who had taught me to make a bird that looked so pleased with itself.

I told him the truth: nobody. The bird had taught itself, through the bad winter when there was no bread and only ink. He closed the book, tucked it under his arm and carried it out to the cart. Next spring the bell rang for the first time in two years, and I found the owl still watching from the foot of the psalter, bound in for good.