Realistic red cardinal perched on a branch, tattooed on the upper back of a person shown from behind in a white racerback vest.

Realistic cardinal on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A realistic red cardinal perches on a thin branch with brown twigs and a soft shaded background, tattooed on the upper back near the shoulder blade. The feathers and bird's head use smooth gradients of red, grey and black, with fine detail on the wing and beak. The image is taken from behind, with the wearer's blonde hair falling over the shoulders and a garage setting in the background.

Realism Back Bird Branch Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cardinal came to the chestnut behind Doss Hollow's filling station the week after the flood, and nobody in Tanner's Bend could say where it had flown in from. Old Mabel Trask said it was the same bird that had sat on her husband's gatepost the morning he went down to the river and never came back up. Her son Willis said that was nonsense, a cardinal was a cardinal, and went on pumping petrol for the Hollis brothers' truck.

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Willis had a debt he did not talk about. He owed Ruth Ennis forty dollars and a letter he had never written, and every evening the bird sat on the same thin branch above the pump and watched him count his change. It did not sing. It only turned its crested head to one side, as if waiting for him to say what he had been putting off.

In October he finally wrote the letter on the back of a credit slip, in pencil, three lines long. He walked it to the Ennis porch himself. Ruth read it standing up, folded it into her apron pocket, and said nothing at all, but she left the screen door open behind her, which in Tanner's Bend was a kind of answer.

The next morning the branch was bare. Willis looked for the bird along the fence and in the ditch and under the pump, and found only a single red feather caught in the wet bark, bright as a struck match. He kept it in his shirt pocket for the rest of his life, and never once said whether it was the cardinal's he was keeping or the letter's.