Small blue bird with spread wings in flight, tattooed in fine line and blue shading on the inner forearm.

Small blue bird in flight on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small bird with outstretched wings is tattooed on the inner forearm, shown in a photograph against a grey textured fabric. The linework is fine and the bird is shaded with soft gradients from pale to deeper blue. The bird sits off-centre in the lower half of the frame, with the wrist and a dark sleeve cuff visible at the edges.

Fine line Forearm Bird Flying bird Wing

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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

Sit closer, the lamp's warm and the wind isn't finished with us yet. My grandmother kept the light on Scarrow Head for thirty-one winters, and she always said the bird came in the autumn the gales took the boathouse roof.

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It was a small thing, no bigger than a fist, and blue the way the sea goes an hour before dark. It struck the glass twice. She climbed the iron stairs with a cloth and found it on the rail below the lantern, wings spread wide as if it meant to keep flying even while it sat. She said it looked at her as though it had come a long way to be told where it was.

She nursed it with sugared water and a dish of crushed oats for three nights. Each evening it fluttered to the window and back again, and the beam swept over it every thirty seconds, turning it pale, then deep, then pale. Her husband, Tom Hallam, who never once in his life gave a bird a name, started calling it Second Mate, because it kept watch on the rail when he went below for his tea.

On the fourth morning the fog lifted clean off the water. She opened the lantern door and the bird went out over the rocks, low, then higher, and she swore it turned and dipped one wing toward the light before it was gone into the blue. Nobody ever told her where it came from. She never needed them to.