Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised heron in blue and grey

Colour · Flash

A stylised heron stands in profile with a long neck, pointed bill and crest feathers. Its body is filled with bold blue ovoid shapes, grey formline curves and small dot details, while the legs are drawn in flat grey with thin outlines. The design is centred on a plain cream background with no shading.

Bird

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

Mrs Hesketh kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Lane, where the sea came in across the saltings twice a day and went out again without asking anyone. The bird arrived in October, the week the last of the summer visitors left. It stood on the wall of the drying green as though it had paid for the place, grey as wet slate, with a crest like a burnt match.

Keep reading

She did not shoo it. Her husband had drowned off the Skerry the winter before, and she had learned that some visitors are better fed than argued with. She set a saucer of herring on the wall each morning, and each morning the heron ate it slowly, watching her with one yellow eye.

In the spring a lodger named Tobias Crane, who sold insurance and never once looked at the tide tables, walked out onto the saltings after dark to prove a point about the causeway. The fog came in. He stood still, as the landlady had told him to, and the water rose to his knees, then to his waist.

The heron came down the causeway on its long grey legs, placing each foot as if it were counting, and it stood in front of him in the rising water until he followed it. Next morning Mrs Hesketh found a single herring on the wall, and beside it Tobias's wet insurance card, pressed flat with a stone. She set out two saucers after that, and never again charged a lodger for the view.