Watercolour-style tattoo of two blue birds perched on dark branches across the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two blue birds on a branch on the upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Two blue songbirds sit on thin black branches, one higher on the shoulder and one lower on the upper arm. The birds are filled with soft blue shading and outlined with dark linework, and loose blue splashes and black drips surround them. The tattoo is shown on bare skin against a plain light background, with the design filling most of the frame.

Upper arm Shoulder Bird Songbird Branch Splash

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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

The rain has been coming sideways across the market since six, and by eleven the paving outside the pet stall is a grey sheet with puddles the colour of dishwater. You have been told twice to move the cages under the awning. You have not moved them. Mr Dunmore left the two blue birds in the wicker cage on the trestle, the one with the sprung door, because nobody in forty years has bought a songbird from a stall that smells of wet straw, and he said he would rather they went to someone who wanted them than rotted in his van.

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A woman in a yellow mac stops, looks at the birds, and asks whether they sing. You tell her they do, in the mornings, and that the male is the loud one. She doesn't buy them. She buys a tin of enamel paint instead, cobalt, and asks you to pour a little into the lid so she can see the colour. The rain hits the lid and the blue spreads across the trestle, thin as watercolour, pooling in the grain of the wood and dripping off the edge as if it means to go somewhere.

The male sees it first. He hops to the door, then stops, because the door has been sprung so long it no longer knows which way it opens. You lift the latch. Nothing happens for a long time. Then he goes out into the rain with a flick of his tail that leaves a dark streak on the air, and his mate follows, and they settle on the iron rail of the awning above the stall, two small blue shapes against the grey.

By closing time the rain has stopped and the puddles hold the sky. You still have the cage in your hand, empty and light as a lantern. The birds are still up there when you pull the shutter down, hunched on the cold rail, not singing, looking down at the blue ink drying on the paving as if they had only ever wanted to see what the rain would do with it.