Colour tattoo of a perched songbird inside a floral wreath with the words Free Indeed above it, on the forearm.

Songbird and floral wreath with Free Indeed

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A songbird with brown and gold plumage and a red-tinged face is perched in the centre, framed by a wreath of yellow and blue-green flowers, leaves and small red buds. The words FREE INDEED are written in black handwritten lettering above the bird. Soft shading gives the bird depth, and the muted palette of greens, yellows, reds and browns sits evenly across the composition.

Neo-trad Botanical Forearm Bird Songbird Flower Wreath Leaves Foliage Lettering

Find an artist for this

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

Maud had carried the thrush in its wicker cage for eleven seasons, from the Lincolnshire coast up to the Yorkshire moors, and every morning she lifted the cloth and told it the weather. The words painted on the side of the coconut shy were her father's work, copied in black from a hymn sheet he never once sang from. FREE INDEED, they curled over the bunting. Nobody on the fair read them as a promise. They were just the name of the stall.

Keep reading

The fair pitched that August at the edge of a market town, between a Wall of Death and a chip van that smelled of vinegar. Maud ran the hook-a-duck pond, and the thrush lived on the rail above it, watching children fish goldfish out of plastic bags. Danny Rourke, who worked the generator and owed her eleven pounds, leaned on that rail one evening and said the bird would never come down for a worm. She said it came down for nothing. He said prove it. She didn't, because she had never once been asked to prove what she already knew.

In the morning the latch was up and the cloth lay folded on the grass like a handkerchief. Maud found the thrush in the chestnut by the car park, singing over the clatter of the ferris wheel being taken down. She stood beneath it with the tea going cold in her hand. Part of her wanted to climb the tree in her slippers. Instead she watched the brown and gold of it turn in the light, and then it dropped onto the bunting and settled on the F of FREE, as if the paint had been put up there for exactly that.