Black outline puffin tattoo with a multicoloured beak and blue and orange watercolour splashes on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Puffin with watercolour splashes on a calf

Fine line · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A puffin perches on a single black line, drawn in bold black outline with a solid black body and a striped orange and yellow beak. Loose blue, orange and yellow watercolour-style splashes surround the bird and drip down towards the perch line. The image is a close, straight-on photo of the tattoo on skin, with the bird centred and the background softly blurred.

Fine line Calf Bird Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The puffin came to the barge the week the river rose over the towpath, and Agnes Pardoe, who had kept the narrowboat Kestrel's Wake for thirty winters, decided it was a bad sign before she had finished her tea. Puffins belonged to the sea, she said, and the sea had no business upriver at Hobbs Lock. The bird did not care what she thought. It stood on the wet mooring line with its feet pressed together and looked at the brown water as though it had paid for the view.

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Her grandson Tobin fed it slivers of mackerel from the lock-keeper's bucket, and it took them from his palm without fuss. By the third day the orange flare of its beak had brightened the grey morning, and dye from the works upstream had streaked the banks in blue and rust, so that every splash of colour seemed to run off the reeds and drip down towards the water. Agnes counted the splashes each morning and lost count at eleven.

On the ninth day the flood drained as quickly as it had come, leaving a crust of silt along the bank. Tobin woke to find the line empty and the bird gone, and he cried until his grandmother walked him to the bow and showed him the marks in the mud: a neat row of prints heading downriver toward the estuary, where the fresh water gives up and the salt begins.

Agnes coiled the rope and hung it on its hook. That evening Tobin drew a puffin on the galley window in soap, one black line for the perch, and when the lamp was lit the little bird glowed orange in the glass, as if it had only stepped off for a moment to look at the sea.