Colourful neo-traditional style tattoo of two birds with swirls and flowers across the top of a foot, with red painted toenails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two colourful birds on a foot

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows a tattoo of two stylised birds with outstretched wings, decorated with floral patterns and flowing swirls, across the top of a foot. The linework is bold and outlined, with smooth shading that gives the wings and bodies depth. Bright green, blue, purple, orange and red inks dominate against the pale skin, and the dark background frames the design.

Neo-trad Other Bird Swirl Flower Wing Floral pattern

Find an artist for this

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

Ada had the brushes out before the lock keeper finished his tea. By the time the boat cleared the long cutting, the cabin doors were bare except for a blank oval where the roses should have gone. Her father had always said a boat should carry something that could fly, so she mixed the reds and greens from the last tins in the locker and painted two birds, one climbing and one diving, their wings opening into fans of scrolling blue and violet. She put flowers on their bellies because her mother had done the same on the kettle.

Keep reading

They dried tacky by evening, and the lock keepers at Hatton admired them. That night the wind came off the reservoir and rattled the tin cups, and Ada woke to find the rear door gleaming wet though no rain had fallen. In the morning there was a smear of orange on the towpath, bright as a dropped sweet, leading off between the hawthorns toward the fields.

Her father shrugged and said birds were always thirsty for paint. But when she followed the trail with a jar of sugar water, it doubled back on itself, green and purple feathers pressed into the mud as though something had stood there and stretched. Two sets of prints, one long-legged and one hopping small, ran out to the edge of a ploughed field and simply stopped.

That evening the boat went on without her to Hatton, and she never did finish the roses. Nobody on the cut has ever seen the birds fly, but the paint on that door has not faded in forty years, and every spring a little more colour turns up in the ditches, as if something out there has not yet decided to come home.