Two ornate framed tattoos on the thighs, a teal pagoda on the left and a blue bird with pink blossom on a branch on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pagoda and bird tattoos on thighs

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

Two matching ornate frames sit side by side on the thighs of a person wearing denim shorts. The left frame holds a teal pagoda, and the right frame shows a blue and orange bird perched on a branch with pink blossom. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft shading in the frames and the pagoda, and the colour is limited to teal, blue, pink and orange.

Thigh Bird Branch Blossom Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The screen had come to Mrs Ashby's workshop in Deptford wrapped in a bedsheet, two panels of lacquer gone soft with damp, and the bird on the right-hand panel had lost its tail to a mouse. She spent a week on the tail alone, with brushes no thicker than a hair and a paste of ground malachite she had bought from a dealer who would not say where he got it.

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The pagoda panel had survived the damp better. Its roof tiers were still sharp, and its teal had kept the cool shade of a pond in August. Her nephew Tobias, who ran the till at the front and pretended not to read the old letters folded behind the frame backs, found the first one on the Thursday. It was addressed to a woman called Rin, and it said only: keep the blossom open until I come back up the river. Do not let them hang the bird facing the tower.

Mrs Ashby thought it nonsense, the sort of thing a cabinetmaker writes to pass the time. But when she hung the panels she turned the bird to face the wall on purpose, and that night the shop bell rang twice with nobody at the door. On Friday a man in a grey coat came in asking for the pair. He stood in front of the screen a long time, then laid a kingfisher's blue feather on the counter, turned it over once, and left without buying anything.

Tobias asked what the feather meant. Mrs Ashby wrapped the panels again in the bedsheet and said that some things were only ever meant to be waited for, and that the bird could face whichever way it liked now.