Colour tattoo of a bird with outstretched wings in loose black linework and orange, green, blue and pink washes, on the upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sketchy colour bird on thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a bird with spread wings and a head turned to one side, drawn with loose, sketchy black lines. Soft washes of orange, green, blue and pink fill the wings and body, giving a painterly, unfinished look. The bird is centred on a close crop of skin against a dark background.

Thigh Bird Wing Feather

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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

Dear Tomasz, the rain has been coming sideways down Chapel Street for three days and the traders have stopped pretending it will ease. Halloran's fish stall awning sagged again on Tuesday, so I climbed up the ladder with a tin of ochre, and while I was up there I painted a bird on the canvas because nobody was looking and the wet had already made the old name run.

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I did it fast, without a pencil line. Black first for the wings, pulled loose so the strokes overlapped like a child's drawing of rain. Then the colour went in after: orange where the sun would be, green along the underside, a blue I mixed from the ink bottle you left behind, and a pink I borrowed from Mrs Okafor's cough syrup label, which is no proper pigment but holds on better than you'd think. I turned the head back over one shoulder, as if the bird had heard its name called from the far end of the market.

Ruth from the veg stall said it looked ready to take off. Halloran said it looked like it had been left out in the weather. Both were right, which is the trouble with paint in the rain. By Friday the blue had bled into the green and the pink had crept past the outline, and I stood under the dripping canvas with water running off my hood, thinking the bird had finally become what it was always going to be: a thing not quite finished, and not about to stop moving.

Write me back, even if it is one line. Bring a proper brush home if you can find one. I have started a second bird on the lid of an apple crate, and this one I am keeping dry.