Colour tattoo of a quetzal bird in an ornate gold frame on the side of a torso, with a teal mandala tattoo on the thigh of a person in a black top.

Quetzal in a frame and teal mandala on thigh

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A person in a black tank top photographs themselves in a mirror, showing a colour tattoo of a quetzal bird with a long green and red tail inside an ornate gold oval frame on the side of the torso. On the thigh is a larger teal and black mandala with dense dotted and scalloped linework. The bird is shaded in greens, red and blue, while the mandala uses mostly teal tones against pale skin.

Neo-trad Geometric Ribs Thigh Bird Frame Mandala Paisley Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the only one left on the fourth floor when the radiators tick themselves quiet, and the portrait you were told not to touch is facing the wrong way again. It is a small oval of a quetzal, painted on board, its gilt frame chipped at the top where someone once knocked it with a ladder. Nobody at Pryce and Lowther can say who consigned it. The lot sheet says only 'Bird, c. 1890, unknown hand.'

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You turn it to the wall as the sheet instructs, and then, because the corridor camera has a dead red light, you turn it back. The blue behind the bird has deepened since Tuesday. The green of its breast has gone the colour of wet moss, and the red has a sheen like something that has only just stopped being warm. Its tail, which the catalogue called a generous plume, now reaches past the bottom of the frame and curls over the edge of the shelf like a dropped ribbon.

On Thursday you mention it to Marguerite, the cataloguer, who laughs and says the bird has been looking at her all week too. She says the woman who sent it in, a Mrs Abernethy from Dulwich, only wanted it gone, and that she had asked, when the paperwork was signed, that the bird never be taken out of its frame after dark. You ask why. Marguerite shrugs and says frames keep things in, which is what the old sellers always say.

Tonight the storeroom is cold and the bird is out of its frame, lying face up on a packing crate, its tail coiled three times around the edge. You lift the gilt oval and it is warm where it touched the wood. You hold it over the bird, and the bird turns its head, slowly, as if it has been waiting for someone to lift the frame. You settle the frame back on it the way a jeweller sets a stone, then switch off the light and go home. On Friday the lot is on the wall again, the frame tilted a little to one side, and the crate is empty except for a single green feather.