Realistic colour tattoo of a tui bird perched among red pohutukawa flowers on the calf.

Tui bird and red flowers on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A tui, a dark blue New Zealand bird with a white throat tuft, is shown in profile looking left, perched beside clusters of red pohutukawa flowers with yellow stamens. The bird is shaded with smooth blue, brown and grey tones that give it volume, while the flowers have soft red gradients and dark green leaves. The design is set against a loose green wash on a lower leg, with the bird and flowers filling the frame from top to bottom.

Realism Botanical Calf Bird Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My grandmother swore the tui could tell good air from bad, and the men on the Kauri Flat shift believed her enough to take notice. Every morning before the whistle, the bird sang from the pohutukawa at the top of the Number Two adit, a run of clicks and bubbling notes that rang out over the stamper sheds and down into the township. When the singing stopped, the men went back to the surface and waited.

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I was twelve the winter the singing stopped. My father, Rewi, had been on nights for a month, and he came home grey with rock dust and said nothing about the seam he was working. I walked up the old tramway with a jam jar and a pocketful of scarlet flowers from the tree by the company gate, because my grandmother said a tui liked to be given something it had already chosen. The bird was there, its white throat tuft lifting in the cold, turning its head to watch me the way a shopkeeper watches a child counting coins.

I left the flowers on a flat stone beside the boarded shaft and sat with my back against the fence post. For a long time nothing happened. Then the tui dropped from its branch, took one stamen from the pile, and flew straight down the bank towards the lower workings, calling all the way. I ran after it, shouting for the shift boss, and by the time the men came up with their lamps the bird was perched on the tin roof of the air shaft, singing as if it had never stopped.

They found a pocket of bad air behind a fall of rock that afternoon. My father told me later that the tui had been stubborn about it, that it would not sing for anyone but me. I did not believe him until I climbed the hill the next morning and found the jar empty, every flower gone, and a single blue feather lying on the stone, as if the bird had paid for the trouble.