Neo-traditional tattoo of a perched songbird surrounded by orange flowers and green leaves, covering the back of a hand.

Songbird and orange flowers on the hand

Neo-trad · Hand · Colour · Photo

A small songbird sits in the centre of the back of the hand, facing right, with its tail extending toward the fingers. Orange five-petal flowers and green leaves frame the bird, and green radiating lines form a sunburst behind it at the wrist. The bird is shaded in soft browns and greys with bold black outlines, while the flowers and foliage use saturated orange and green.

Neo-trad Botanical Hand Bird Songbird Flower Leaves Sunburst

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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

Mind the wasps on that windfall, they've been at it since Tuesday. Sit where I can see you. Right, you want the one about the thrush, or the one about the Hallam girl and the ladder? I'll tell the thrush, because the ladder's got a lie in it and I'm too old to keep lies straight.

Keep reading

Every August for forty years, a small brown bird came down into old Tom Ferris's apple rows at the hour the sun went flat over the hedge. It had a grey throat and a beak like a split seed, and it sang as if the whole valley owed it money. Tom swore it was the same bird each year. My mother said that was nonsense, birds don't last that long. Tom said nothing and left the gate open.

One summer the gate stayed shut. Tom's hip had gone, the rows went to rot, and the wasps took the drops. The bird came anyway. It sat on the wall where the wild clematis threw its green spokes out like a sunrise and sang at a hedge with nobody behind it. Then the marigolds came up along the path, fat and five-petalled, and a girl from the village with ink on her fingers started cutting the grass. She never once looked at the bird. She just hummed back at it.

On the last evening of that August, Tom's window was lit, and the bird flew up to the sill and dropped a single orange blossom on the glass. That's all there was to it. Nobody could say how it got there. I've kept the petal in my tin, if you want to see it, though you'll have to take the wasp off your sleeve first.