Colour sketch style tattoo of a small bird with loose black linework and blue and pink washes, sitting on the upper chest beside the shoulder, with a faint swirl above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sketched bird on the shoulder and chest

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A small bird, seen in profile facing right, is tattooed across the upper chest near the shoulder. Loose black lines overlap to form the body and wing, with dark hatching below and fine marks around the tail and head. Soft blue, pink and grey washes sit inside and around the outline, and a faint curved swirl and scattered dots sit above and beside it on a plain, lightly lit background.

Shoulder Chest Bird Swirl Sketch Watercolour

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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 lamp was turning when the thump came, a sound like a dropped glove against the glass, and by the time you climbed the iron stairs with the torch the bird was already lying on the gallery grating, one wing folded wrong, its breast still rising. You had logged forty-one strikes that autumn. Your predecessor, Mr Ashdown, had kept a jar of feathers on the shelf above the paraffin tins, each labelled by date, and you had thought him morbid until now.

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You cupped it in your palms and it weighed less than the tea caddy's spoon. Its colours came up strange in the lamplight, blue fading to grey, a flush of rose beneath the throat, like the sky over the Farne at five in the morning when the weather could not decide. You wrapped it in a folded flannel and set it in the cupboard beside the kettle, then wrote in the log: one bird, small, struck north glass 02:14, alive.

At first light the wind had swung round and the sea lay grey as silk, the spray over the rocks curling like someone had traced a line in the water with a wet brush. You carried the flannel out onto the landing. The bird sat up, ruffled itself, and regarded you with one bright eye as though you owed it an apology. You opened your hands.

It did not fly straight. It circled the lamp housing once, twice, as if measuring the light, then levelled and dropped toward the mainland with the wind behind it. You stood until it was a mark, then a speck, then nothing. In the log you wrote a single line, crossed out 'lost', and wrote 'gone on'.