Colour tattoo of two bob-haired girls beneath pink peonies and a grey bird, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two girls with peonies and a bird on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

Two bob-haired girls with downcast eyes share a single outline, their pale shoulders fading into the skin. Pink peonies and small blue flowers surround their heads, and a grey songbird perches on the right. Soft, painterly shading and watercolour-like colour wash give the piece a delicate, muted look, with the composition wrapping around the flank.

Ribs Bob haircut Peony Flower Blue flower Bird Portrait

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

The bird came back to the sill the morning after the storm, grey as harbour slate, and Ilse said it was Marit's doing, because Marit had always been the one who could coax a thing home. The two of them had shared a room above the net loft in Carrick Bay until they were nineteen, with the same blunt fringe and the same habit of looking down when they were scolded, so people said they were one face cut in half.

Keep reading

The peonies were the trouble. Their mother grew them in the wall garden behind the chandlery, pink as boiled sweets, and every June the sisters cut armfuls and carried them down to the quay to sell. Marit wanted the ferry to Lerwick and never coming back. Ilse wanted only the bench by the lighthouse. They quarrelled over that bench for three summers, until the autumn Marit's boat went out past the breakwater and did not return, and the bird began to sit on the sill.

I have written this four times, Marit, and each time I made you sound braver than you were. Mrs Abernethy says the Lerwick boat sails on Thursday with a crate of peonies for the hospital, so you may smell them before you see me. I am not asking you to come back to the bench. I am asking you to say plainly whether you still want to be the one who goes.

This morning the grey bird sat where your shoulder would be, facing the glass, the way you used to sit with your back to the room so I could do your plaits. I did not shoo it. I opened the sash, and it studied the water a long while before it left a single petal on the sill, pink and browning at the edges, as though it had been carried all the way from the garden to tell me something. I have pressed it in the book where you kept the ferry tickets. Write soon. Your other half, Ilse.