Neo-traditional tattoo of a stylised bird with a crescent moon and diamond shapes on the inner forearm, in yellow, blue-grey and orange.

Stylised bird and crescent moon on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A stylised bird with a round eye, patterned wing panels and a dotted chest fills the centre of the forearm, with a yellow crescent moon and two diamond shapes above it. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with stippled shading on the wing and dark splashes behind the bird. The palette is yellow, blue-grey, orange and black, and another person's hand holds the arm from below, with their own tattoos partly visible.

Neo-trad Forearm Bird Crescent moon Diamond Dot Star Hand

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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 sawdust on the step, it gets in your shoes and never comes out. Right, you want the one about the bird that wouldn't work the crowd. I'll tell it the way Old Tobiah told it to me, and he had it from a woman who sold pies at the gate.

Keep reading

The Halloran and Vane Travelling Show was down to four wagons by the autumn of the bad year. The elephant had gone to a farm in Lincolnshire, the strongman to a bookie's in Leeds, and the lions were kept on a rope in a field that smelt of diesel. What was left was a grey finch called Mistress Quill, with a streak of blue in her wings, and a tin box of painted paper diamonds she was meant to pick out for the crowd. Every night she'd hop to the box, look up at the lamps as if they bored her, and choose the wrong one on purpose.

Nobody blamed her. Ruby Vane, who ran the show on stewed tea and spite, blamed the weather. But the crescent moon on the ringmaster's gate had been painted over twice, and the gold kept bleeding back through the blue, and Tobiah swore the bird knew the difference between a moon that had been promised and one that was only paint.

On the last night the wind tore a crescent out of the big top's roof, right above the sawdust ring. The crowd gasped, the band stopped, and Mistress Quill flew up through the gap, circled once over the empty trapeze, and settled on the torn edge like a chip of gold. Ruby cursed her. Tobiah laughed till he cried. The diamonds, I'm told, stayed in their box until morning.