Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a vulture with a red head and a pink rose with green leaves on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vulture and rose on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large vulture with a bare red head and yellow eye sits in profile, with grey and black feathered wings and a yellow crescent behind it. A pink rose with dark green leaves sits at the lower left of the design. Bold outlines, smooth colour fills and soft shading on the feathers give the piece a clean, saturated finish.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas,

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The bird came back again this morning, sitting on the post above the barrier as if it had been hired to watch the lorries. Sergeant Ruiz says it is a condor and not a vulture, though I have heard the two swapped in a dozen arguments at the café in Vallecito, and I have stopped minding who is right. Its head is bare and red as a scalded hand, and it turns that yellow eye on every driver who lowers a window to show his papers.

You asked in your last letter whether the crossing is still worth keeping open. Honestly, I do not know. The customs shed has no heating, and the rose you sent me from the coast, the one in the tin pot by the stove, has given up two blooms since October. But the birds know the road better than we do. They ride the thermals over the pass at the hour the moon comes up thin and gold above the ridge, and when the trucks are late they circle and wait with the patience of people who have nowhere else to be.

Last Thursday a man came over on foot with a boy asleep on his shoulder. He had no papers, only a folded map drawn in ink on the back of a seed packet. Ruiz wanted to send him back down. I stood between them and said the bird had already decided and it was not our place to argue with it. Ruiz laughed, which I took as a yes. We stamped nothing and wrote nothing down, and we watched the two of them walk on into the grey dusk while the vulture lifted off the post and followed them as far as the first bend.

I have pressed one of the rose petals into this letter. Keep it. Come up in spring, if the road allows, and bring me the seed packet from the coast so I can plant what the stove will not kill.

Love, Inés

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