Three views of a large Japanese style rooster tattoo with long tail feathers and a teal peony on a thigh and leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rooster and peony down a leg

Japanese · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large bird with a red comb, orange and gold wing feathers and long dark tail feathers runs down the thigh and calf, with a teal peony flower near the hip. The bold outlines and shading are smooth and layered, with rich orange, red, teal and green inks against dark grey feathers. Three side by side panels show the tattoo from the front, the back and the side against a black background.

Japanese Thigh Rooster Bird Phoenix Peony Flower Feather Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had lain on the Hollin Farm fields since Martinmas, and by the feast of Saint Lucy the hens had stopped laying. Mags Tennant went out each dawn with a lantern and a bucket of meal, and each dawn the cockerel was there before her, standing on the byre roof with his red comb black against the stars. He was the colour of a harvest fire, orange at the wing and gold at the throat, and his tail fell down the wall in long dark feathers like smoke that had decided to stay.

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Nobody in the valley could remember a bird like him. Old Ned at the mill said he had come up out of the peat bog the spring the water froze, and that a cockerel which rises out of a bog ought to be eaten or else thanked. Mags did neither. She set her meal down and waited, as her mother had taught her, and when the bird turned his head towards the east and opened his beak, the sound that came out was not a crow at all but a bell rung far under the hill.

The sun came up that morning a finger's width earlier than the almanac said it would. Ned swore to it. The snow on the north field went soft and blue, and at the edge of the lane a teal peony opened out of the hedge, as if someone had dropped a handful of summer on the frost and it had caught.

Mags never saw the bird again after that. But every December the hedge still blooms out of season, and the rooster's feathers come down on the byre step, orange and gold, and she sweeps them into the stove and says thank you.