Colour tattoo of two songbirds on a branch with orange buds and a red lotus flower on the outer thigh, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two birds and a red lotus on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two stylised songbirds perched on a thin branch with orange buds, above a large red lotus flower. The birds have patterned wings in blue, yellow and red, with fine detailing on the feathers. Bright colour dominates the composition, which is set against a plain pale background on the outer thigh.

Botanical Thigh Bird Branch Lotus Flower Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook's boy on the Lantern Hope bought two songbirds in Lisbon from a woman who would not say where she had caught them, and for six weeks out of the Canaries they sat on the perch he had whittled and did not sing once. Joss fed them millet from his own ration and talked to them in the dog watch, but the birds only turned their heads toward the sea.

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The old women of his village had a saying that a bird which will not sing has forgotten the water it came from. So Joss went to the bread locker where the purser kept a book of pressed flowers gathered in a Madeira garden, and he took out the one flower in it that was still red. It was a lotus, its petals gone the colour of old wine. He floated it in the water tin and set the tin beside the cage, and that night the smaller bird opened its throat and sang as if a door had come unstuck.

The gale came off the Bay of Biscay three days later and the main topsail went like a gunshot. Through the whole night, while the men were lashed to the pumps, Joss could hear the birds over the wind, and the watch swore afterwards that they had steered by it, that the pitch of that song sat square off the bow when the compass lied. They raised the Lizard at dawn.

At Falmouth Joss opened the cage on the quay and the birds flew straight up into the rigging of a schooner, then down into a hawthorn hedge where the blossom was out. He kept the lotus in the book. Some nights he took it out and looked at the red of it, and the water tin on the galley shelf still held a single pale petal, which he would not throw away.