Colour tattoo of a yellow and blue Seuss-style bird with swirling feathers and handwritten lettering on a thigh.

Seussian bird and quote on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A cartoon-style bird with a yellow head, small blue beard and long swirling blue feathers sits in the centre of the design, with a second feathered blue shape above it. Handwritten lettering in black runs around the feathers on the thigh, with parts of the words legible. The ink is mostly blue with yellow accents, set against bare skin and a blue top and pink underwear at the top of the frame.

Thigh Bird Feather Swirl Lettering Quote Creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs officer at Dover had already stamped the crate twice when he lifted the tissue paper and found the bird looking back at him, yellow-headed and blue-bearded, its feathers curling over the edges of the board like smoke that had decided to keep its shape. 'It's a screen,' said Maud Pellow, who had painted it one wet winter in a rented room above a chip shop in Margate. 'For my sister's wedding.' The officer read the words curling along the lower rail, Keep your feathers and keep your nerve, then looked at her for a long moment. 'Does it need declaring?' he asked. 'Only that it's cheerful,' Maud said.

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He waved her through, and she carried the screen past the barriers into drizzle that smelled of diesel and sea. Behind her, a second feathered shape seemed to lift from the board in the wind, though she was too busy holding her hat to check. Her sister's flat was on the third floor of a block in Folkestone, and the lift had been broken since May. Maud climbed the stairs with the screen balanced on one shoulder, counting landings aloud the way she had as a girl, and by the top she had decided the bird should go in the window, where the light would reach its beard.

Her sister opened the door already crying, the way brides do before anything has happened. Maud turned the screen toward the room and let the feathers unfurl across the wallpaper like a flag nobody had asked for. Nobody asked what it meant. It was enough that it was there, and that it had come across the water in one piece.