Pen and ink drawing of a bird with spread wings, shaded in grey with red watercolour splashes across the paper, as a tattoo design.

Red splash bird in flight

Mixed · Flash

A bird with spread wings and a tucked tail is drawn in black linework with grey shading on white paper. Loose red watercolour washes and splatter spread across the wings, body and branch-like perch. The bird is centred on the page, with its wings angled diagonally.

Bird Wing Branch Splatter

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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

The bird came down on the mooring line just as I was swearing at the lock gate, its wings still half open and shedding river water in red beads I first took for blood. Dad always said a bird that picks a moving boat over a tree is either lost or looking for work. This one looked like it had come a long way on a short temper.

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For three mornings it sat on the bow rail while I cracked ice off the paddles, tail tucked tight, watching the towpath with the patience of a foreman. Each dusk it lifted off and went downstream, wings spread wide as a fan, and each dawn it was back, sometimes with a fresh smear of dye on its breast from wherever it had been. I stopped shooing it. Somebody on the Kennet had to keep the morning company.

On the fourth day it did not come back, so I walked the towpath to Ashford Bridge with the spare line over my shoulder. Under the arch, half sunk in the reeds, lay an old dye barge with its name painted over in brick red. Tangled on its roof was a hawthorn branch, and hanging from the branch was a tin cup. Inside the cup was a folded paper in my father's hand, the word LOCK and a tide time, and beside it a single feather as black as ink.

I took the feather, left the cup where it hung, and when I cast off that evening the bird was waiting on the bow, red wings open against the low sun, as if it had been counting the days.