Drawing of a stylised dark brown bird with red, orange and yellow wing feathers and teal leaves and stars, presented as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised bird with flame-coloured wings

Colour · Flash

A stylised bird in profile is drawn as a solid dark brown silhouette with a raised head and a sprig of teal leaves in its beak. Its wings are outlined and shaded with red, orange and yellow feather strokes, and small teal star shapes hang from the wing tips. The design sits centred on a plain pale background with clean, bold outlines.

Bird Wing Feather Star Leaves

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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 down, sit down, you'll not hear the end of it standing. The Crescent Ballroom at Ferrier's Pier, the winter of the big gale, and the band had just struck up the last waltz when the bird came down through the skylight. Black as a boot it was, with its neck raised like a question and a sprig of teal leaves caught crossways in its beak. Nobody screamed. Old Mrs Abernethy only lifted her glass and said, 'Well, it's about time someone brought us flowers.'

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The bird walked the length of the dance floor, slow as a deacon, and every couple stopped to watch it pass. Its wings were burning at the edges, red and orange and yellow, the way a candle flame goes when a draught catches it, and from the wing tips hung little blue stars on threads, knocking together like teaspoons in a cup. Young Tommy Rourke, who'd been courting the cloakroom girl since Easter, swore the stars were ringing. I'd had three whiskies by then, so I believed him.

It stopped at the bandstand, set the leaves down on the drummer's snare, and looked at the room with one eye, the way a magistrate looks at a man who has said too much. Then it opened those burning wings and the whole hall went gold and warm, and we were all twenty again, dancing till the lamps guttered.

Come morning the pier was swept clean, the skylight mended, and there was no bird and no leaves. But the cloakroom girl wore a sprig of teal pinned to her coat for forty years after, and Tommy Rourke never once asked her where she'd got it. That's the trouble with a good night. It keeps its own counsel.