Close-up of a red and green stylised bird tattoo with green wing feathers and a red curled tail on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and green stylised bird on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A stylised bird with a red outlined body, curled tail and head, and three sweeping green feather strokes rising from its back. The linework is smooth and bold, with the red forms defined by solid lines and the green feathers filled as tapering strokes. The tattoo sits centrally on skin with soft lighting and a plain, slightly out-of-focus background.

Back Bird Wing Feather Swirl Tail

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now then, shift up and mind the kettle, because this is the bit where your grandfather always spilt his tea. The winter of the big frost, the lane up to Coldharbour Farm was white to the gateposts, and Mrs Pritchard's hens had stopped laying, which in January is as good as a death in the family. Her son Ewan went out at first light to break the ice on the trough, and there on the stone sill of the milking parlour sat a bird the colour of a postbox, its tail curled under it like a question nobody had got round to asking.

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He thought it would fly at his boots. It didn't. He broke a heel of bread and set it on the sill, and the bird took it from his fingers as neat as a vicar at communion, then hopped into the barn and roosted on the rafter above the seed bins. For nine days it stayed. The dogs wouldn't go past the door, and the hens, God love them, started laying again out of pure bad manners. When the bird shook the snow from itself each morning, three long green strokes rose from its back and lay down again, like someone had painted them in a hurry and then thought better of it.

On the tenth morning the thaw came in off the moor with a noise like cannons, and the barn was empty. Ewan found three green feathers on the sill, still warm from the sun, and his mother said that was the bird paying its rent. He kept them in the Bible for forty years, and not one of us has ever been able to say he was wrong to.

So drink up, and mind the cat on the hearth.