Close photo of a small colour tattoo of rainbow silhouette birds flying up the inner forearm toward the wrist, red at the lower end through to dark blue at the top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rainbow birds in flight on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A row of solid silhouette birds in flight runs diagonally up the skin, shifting through red, orange, yellow, green, pale blue and navy from the lower left to the upper right. The bird shapes are filled with flat colour with soft edges and no outlines or internal shading. A dark streak sits at the top right edge of the frame, and the plain skin around the tattoo is pale and evenly lit.

Forearm Bird Rainbow Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had come down on Saltergate market since first light, and Oda the dyer had sold nothing but a single yard of blue thread. She sat under the tarpaulin with her pots steaming beside her and watched the puddles pock the cobbles. When the tanner's boy came by with his cart and asked what she was making, she pointed at the line of wet wool drying on the rail: red, then orange, yellow, green, a pale grey-blue, and last a navy so deep it looked wet even when dry.

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"Birds," she said. "My grandmother used to say that every colour the rain washes out of the world goes up and becomes one."

The boy laughed and asked where they flew. Oda pulled the navy skein down and held it up to the grey sky. Above the roofs a dark cloud was tearing at its edge, a long streak like a feather drawn across the slates. "Up there, mostly. Only the red one ever comes back, to see who is still dyeing."

She had not finished the sentence before the red wool on the rail gave a small shiver, as if something had lifted off it and gone.