Colour tattoo of a bird in flight with pink and blue wings and a black outline, placed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink and blue bird in flight on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A stylised bird in flight with outstretched wings and a small eye is the central subject. The wings and body are filled with soft, blended shading in pink, magenta, violet and blue, with loose streaks that suggest a painterly finish, and the outline is in black. The bird sits diagonally across the upper arm against a plain skin background, with a blue top and patterned fabric visible at the edges of the frame.

Upper arm Bird Flying bird Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dyer's widow at Sallow Fold kept her vats behind the chapel, and every spring she boiled up whatever the hedgerows would give her. That year the madder came early and the woad came thin, so when a bird first landed on her washing line in April she took it for a sign of rain. It was no sparrow. Its wings were the grey-blue of wet slate, turning violet where the sun got under them, and its breast was streaked with the red of her madder pot.

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It came back every morning and sat on the same peg while she worked. She tried to shoo it, then gave up and let it watch. Mixing a dip for the wool, she found the colours came out exactly as the bird was made, pink running into blue in long feathered strokes, and she stopped trying to tidy them. Eli Rudd, who carried the post up the lane, stood at her gate one Thursday and offered two shillings for a skein of it. She told him the bird was not for sale. He laughed and said that was the most sensible thing anyone had said about birds in Sallow Fold.

The winter the river froze, the bird took a length of blue cloth off the line in its beak and flew it up over the chapel roof, unfurling it like a banner against the grey sky. The widow stood in the snow and watched until it was a smudge, then a mark, then nothing at all. She had dyed that cloth for her own wedding, years before, and had never once put it on.

In spring the vats were full of madder again, and she lifted a skein out to rinse it. In the red water one thread stayed blue. It ran the whole length of the wool like a line drawn with a fine brush, and a single grey feather lay caught in the knot at the end.