Neo-traditional colour tattoo of two bluebirds, a pink peony and a red gem pendant on the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two bluebirds and a peony on a shoulder

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

Two teal and orange bluebirds sit among a large pink peony, with strands of dark beads and pearls hanging across the design. A red oval gem pendant hangs near the lower bird, with green leaves and a thin branch below. The shading is smooth and fully saturated, and the image is a triptych with the same photo repeated in three panels.

Neo-trad Botanical Shoulder Bird Peony Flower Gem Pendant Pearl Bead Leaves Branch

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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 garnet came in cracked along its setting, the way Mother said old stones always did when they had been kept too long in one drawer. I laid it under the loupe on the bench in the Ring's workshop and waited for the lamp to warm. Outside the port, the cargo spine turned slowly past the window, and somewhere in its hull a machine was pressing seeds for the spring planting.

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The pendant had come from Earth in a sealed box, along with a scrap of cloth painted with two birds and a great pink flower. Our records listed the birds as extinct. Nobody on the Ring had ever seen one, but Mother had taught me to draw them from her grandmother's sketchbook: teal backs, breasts the colour of a late apricot, a small shine in the eye like a bead of water. She said you had to know the bird before you could mend anything it held.

I took a fine file to the setting and a thread of gold no thicker than hair. The peony on the cloth had been dyed in a red no printer on the Ring could match, so I ground a pinch of iron oxide with the last of the rose pigment from the lab and mixed my own. The strands of beads that hung across the branch I restrung one by one, counting under my breath the way she used to.

When the stone finally sat true, I held it up to the lamp and saw, through its red glow, the two birds on the cloth turn their heads toward each other. I knew it was only my hands tilting the light. I wrapped the pendant in paper, wrote the address of the family who had sent it, and left the lamp burning so the next shift would see the bird was whole.