Colour realism tattoo of a swan with a red and black beak, its wing raised over blue water, on the inner forearm of a person wearing a blue top.

Realistic swan on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A realistic swan with its neck curved and its wing raised, set above a band of blue water. The feathers are rendered with soft greys, white highlights and fine detail along the wing edges. Blue ink in the water and shading contrasts with the red and black beak, and the design sits on the forearm against a wooden floor.

Realism Forearm Swan Water Feather Wing Beak Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told the swan was a nuisance, and for three weeks he had agreed with the cellarer. It drove the ducks off the abbey mere, it hissed at the novices who came down with bread, and once it had pinned a lay brother against the wash-house wall until the bell saved him. Yet each morning Anselm carried his ink-horn down to the scriptorium window and found the bird waiting on the water below, neck bent in the pale shape of a question, as though it had come to see how the psalter was coming along.

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The psalter was late. The abbot wanted the Lady Psalm finished before the bishop's visit at Candlemas, and Anselm could not make the initial letter sit right. He had ground lapis for the blue, and the blue was true, but the bird kept getting into the margins. He would draw a wing and find the feathers had gone grey, then draw a neck and find the curve had lost its nerve. Brother Hugh, who had the next desk and no patience, said the swan was a poor sort of saint to be painting.

On the last evening before the frost, Anselm took his stool to the water's edge with a board on his knees. The swan did not move while he worked. It lifted one wing into the low sun, and he saw how the primaries overlapped like the slates on the infirmary roof, how the light caught the white and left the belly in shadow, the water beneath it a band of deepening blue. He worked until the compline bell rang and the fog came up and the bird was only a grey shape on the grey mere.

In the morning the bishop's gift was ready on the lectern, the initial curving exactly as the neck had. The swan had gone. When Anselm came down to the water with a crust for the ducks, he found a single white feather lying on the reeds, and beside it, weighted with a stone, the sketch he had torn from the margin the night before. Brother Hugh said nothing about it at all, which Anselm took for forgiveness.