Colour tattoo of a quail with orange and yellow California poppies and pink flowers on the thigh, in a neo-traditional style.

Quail and California poppies on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A quail with a plumed head crest stands above a cluster of orange and yellow California poppies and pink flowers with green leaves. The bird is shaded with smooth tonal gradients and scale-like feather detail, outlined in dark lines. Bright colour dominates, and the design runs up the thigh with the bird's clawed foot visible at the base.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hester had sold the hens in March, but the quail stayed, twelve of them in wire pens behind the packing shed, because her father had bought the first pair from a man in Lodi who swore they would outlast the orchard. By June the orchard had gone to the bank and the quail were all that paid for the feed. Each morning she counted them with a stick, and each morning the cock with the black plume stood on the fence post and counted her back.

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The poppies came late that year. After the April rains the hillside above the dry creek turned orange in a week, and Hester could not bring herself to mow it. Her neighbour's boy, Danny Oakes, rode up on his bicycle with a letter from the county and found her sitting on an upturned crate in the middle of the flowers, the quail scattering around her boots like dropped change.

"They want an answer by Friday," he said, holding out the envelope.

She did not take it. The cock walked out from the poppies, picked his way across the crushed petals with his scaled breast catching the sun, and stopped at her feet. He looked up at the envelope, then at her, and gave the small, offended cluck that meant the feed was late. She laughed for the first time in weeks. "Tell them I'm busy," she said, and went to get the grain.

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