Neo-trad style tattoo of a stylised bird with patterned plumage, tulips and vines in black outline with blue, red and orange fill on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised bird and tulips on the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A stylised bird with a long curved neck and a fanned tail stands among tulips, small five-petal flowers and curling vines with leaves. The black outlines are bold and even, and the bird's wings and neck are filled with hexagon and scale patterns in blue, grey and peach. Colour is applied in blue, orange, red and peach, set against the pale skin of the ribs, with the design running vertically down the side of the torso.

Neo-trad Botanical Ribs Bird Peacock Tulip Flower Vine Leaves Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down on the step, the lot of you, and mind the glass. You want to know about the bird on the fourteenth floor? Right. My nan told me this one herself, sat where you're sitting, and she never once got the ending the same twice. But the bones of it were always the same. The bird came up the stairwell in a biscuit tin before it ever came up in paint.

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She'd had a house in a village with a painted door, and on that door was a long-necked bird with a tail like a fan, and every feather of the tail had an eye at its tip. Then the soldiers came, and the house burned, and the door was the only thing left standing, scorched black on one side. So she took it off its hinges and carried it three hundred miles on her back. 'Eyes on the tail,' she'd say, tapping the table, 'so nothing sneaks up behind you.' Then she'd go quiet, because she'd lost her sister at the border, and her sister had always been the one who did the tulips.

When the council sent men to whitewash the stairwell the year the lifts broke, Nan went down with her tin of paints and stood in front of the wall like a bouncer. Mr Pryce from number nine brought her a folding chair. The men had a bucket and a roller and a face on them, and she said, 'Paint over my bird and you'll be climbing these stairs till Easter.' They looked up at the bird. The bird looked back with its blue eye. They went off and had their tea.

I'm not saying the bird did anything. Birds don't. But the window box on the fourteenth floor has had red tulips in it ever since, and if you go up tonight, put your thumb on the tail, just the lightest press, and see if the paint's still warm.