Watercolour-style pink flamingo tattoo with fine black linework and teal splashes on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink flamingo on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A pink flamingo stands in profile, its neck curved in an S shape, with loose black linework outlining the beak, legs and feathers. Soft pink wash fills the body while teal and pink splashes sit behind the bird, giving a painterly effect. The tattoo is shown on a raised forearm against a plain white door, with a floral and plaid sleeve at the top of the frame.

Forearm Flamingo Bird Splash

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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

Hush now, and mind the kettle, because the bit I'm coming to is the bit where the flamingo stepped out of the lift on the fourteenth floor of Harrowgate House and asked Mrs Pemberton for a cup of tea without sugar.

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She was a widow with a balcony full of geraniums and a radio that only picked up the shipping forecast. She said no to the bird at first. Flamingos don't do stairs, she told it, and they certainly don't do lifts. But the bird had climbed the outside of the building, long legs stepping from ledge to ledge like a man crossing a stream on stones, and it had a look on its face that said it had been up all night and wasn't leaving without a biscuit.

So she gave it one. It ate with its head upside down, the way they do, and while it ate the sky over the car park turned teal, then a pink you'd only ever see on a sunset over the gasworks. Colour flew off the bird's wings and stuck to the walls like paint from a careless brush.

Now here's the turn. The bird wasn't lost. It was counting. Every floor it had climbed was a colour it had been given back by somebody who once looked up and saw something worth keeping. When it had counted the last one, it stepped back over the railing, neck curled like a question mark, and went off towards the marshes with the dawn on its back.

Mrs Pemberton kept the biscuit tin. She said the splashes never washed off the wall, and if you look hard enough, you can still see them, teal and pink, on the fourteenth floor.