Colour tattoo of a vulture perched on a grey branch, with an orange and red head and black and grey feathered body, in a traditional style on a calf.

Vulture on a branch in colour

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A vulture with a bare orange and red head and a hooked beak perches on a grey branch, gripping it with orange-striped talons. The body is shaded in black and grey, with scale-like feathers on the wing and tiny teardrop marks on the chest. Bold dark outlines and flat colour fills give a classic, graphic look, and the bird is centred and fills most of the frame.

Neo-trad Traditional Calf Bird Branch Talon Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of August you have stopped shooing the vulture off the dead plum limb. Your father never allowed birds of prey near the Conference pears, but he has been three weeks in the churchyard now, and the bird has taken to sitting above the sorting shed as if it had been hired. Its head is bare and the colour of a Victoria plum split in the sun, and it watches you cross the grass with a patience you find almost rude.

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The pickers complain about it. Yusuf says a carrion bird in the orchard during harvest is bad luck, and his nan swore the same about magpies. You tell them it has eaten nothing but the wasps that gather over the windfalls, which is true, and that the wasps were the real trouble. Nobody believes you, but the crates keep coming in full, and by Friday the drops are cleared without a single stung hand.

On the last Saturday you climb the ladder to the top rows to check the Bramleys. The vulture lifts as your hand reaches the branch, and the beat of its wings shakes loose a shower of leaves and one hard green apple that cracks on the stones below. When you look up it is circling wide over the lane, grey feathers laid out like overlapping scales, the low sun catching the orange of its neck. You stand there longer than you need to, watching it go.

On Monday the shed door is shut and the plum limb is bare. Someone has left a fruit on the windowsill, split down one side, with a wasp drowning in its juice.