Traditional colour tattoo of a pelican perched on a wooden post beside a rope, with pink clouds behind it, on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pelican on a post with rope

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A brown pelican stands on a wooden post with a coiled rope at its base, shown in bold black outlines with scale-patterned shading on its wing and a yellow-tinged head. The background uses soft pink clouds on a teal wash, and the colour ink dominates alongside black and grey shading. The image is a three-panel composition showing the same tattoo on a lower leg.

Traditional Calf Bird Rope Cloud

Find an artist for this

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

Nobody on the slipway would admit to feeding the pelican, but every morning it was waiting on the old mooring post at Carrick Stairs, feathers puffed against the wind, looking out past the breakwater as if it had a tally to keep. Mags Honeyman swore it was the same bird that had followed her father's coble home from the Dogger grounds in the winter of the big blow, and since nobody could prove otherwise, the harbourmaster let it be.

Keep reading

The Sally Ann went out on the Tuesday with five men and a boy named Rob Cuthill who had never been to sea. The sky over the water was the colour of a bruise going yellow at the edges, and the pink clouds piled up behind the headland in a way that made the old men spit over the wall. Mags watched from the steps. The pelican did not leave the post, but when the boat came round the point it lifted its great bill and let out a sound like a rusted hinge, and the boy in the bow stood up and waved both arms over his head.

They tied up at dusk, all six of them, though one had been hauled over the rail by his collar and was still coughing salt. Nobody thanked the bird. Mags coiled the wet hawser on the post beneath it, three loops and a half, the way her father had taught her, and the pelican shuffled along the timber to make room for her hands.

By morning it had gone. The post was bare except for one brown feather caught in the knot of the rope, and the boy from the Sally Ann came down the steps with his cap in his hands to look for it.