Colour tattoo of two bullfinches in flight on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with red breasts and blue-grey wings and loose splashes of ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two bullfinches in flight on a shoulder blade

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

Two bullfinches are shown in flight, one lower left and one upper right, with red breasts, black heads and blue-grey wings. The wings and edges use soft shading and loose, splattered ink marks that give a watercolour-like effect, while the bodies are more solidly shaded. The red and blue tones dominate against the pale skin, and the birds are placed across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Shoulder Back Bird Flying Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Aske kept the fair's gallopers in a shed behind the dodgems, and every October he let me have the small panels nobody wanted, the boards either side of the organ where the pipes stood up like church organs. That autumn I was seventeen and sure of myself. "Birds," he said, tossing me a tin of red lake. "Nobody looks at birds on a fair, so do what you like."

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I painted two bullfinches from the hawthorn by the lorry park, where a pair had been feeding on the hips all week. I thinned the blue-grey with so much water it ran like weak tea, then flicked the brush at the wings so the ink broke into spatter, the way rain comes off a windscreen. The breasts I left solid, a red so thick it looked wet. When I held the board up to the light in the yard, the birds seemed to be leaving the wood altogether, one low and one high, as if they had only just noticed the fair was packing up.

We moved on to Skipton, then Keighley, then nowhere in particular through the wet months. Mr Aske sold the organ boards in February to a man from Harrogate who wanted them for his hall. I never saw them again. I kept the last brush, stiff with lake, in my coat pocket.

On the morning the lorries pulled out for the new season, a real bullfinch was sitting on the wing mirror of the cab, red as paint, watching me as if I owed it money. I hadn't stolen anything. I had only borrowed the colour, and it had come to collect.