Watercolour-style tattoo of a bird in flight with bright red, green and blue wings, set among black and blue vertical brush strokes on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour bird and brush strokes on a thigh

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A bird in flight, with outstretched wings in red, green and blue, sits beside vertical streaks of blue and black that resemble brush marks or piano keys. Loose splatter dots and thin black cross-hatched lines surround the bird, giving the piece a painterly, unfinished feel. The main colours are bright blue, green, red and pink, with solid black used for the streaks and the bird's body, and the design is placed across the outer thigh.

Thigh Bird Splatter Brush stroke Watercolour Abstract Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The parlour piano at Gull Rock House had been out of tune since the winter the sea came into the cellar, and Mrs Pardoe said nobody would play it again, so the lodgers used it for hanging their wet towels. I was nine that summer and too young to be trusted with the scrubbing brush, so I carried the tea up the back stairs and listened at the door of Room Four.

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The man in Room Four was called Teague, and he painted birds on the backs of old calendar pages. He had a tin of watercolours with the paints gone to puddles and a brush he chewed when he was thinking. Every evening he went down to the rocks with the last of the light and came back with his trousers soaked to the knee. One night I found him in the parlour with the lid of the piano lifted, dabbing blue onto the ivory keys, which were yellow and cracked like old teeth. 'They're only sticks that remember a tune,' he said. 'I'm giving them something new to remember.'

On the last morning of August a swift came in through the open window, struck the mirror over the sideboard, and dropped stunned onto the rug. Teague knelt and cupped it in his hands the way you would shelter a candle flame. When it flew out again it left a smear of red across the glass, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on the piano stool, which gave one low note, the first in years.

He left the calendar pages stuck to the wallpaper of Room Four. I still have the one with the bird, its wings dragged out in green and red, and a row of thin black lines ruled beneath it like keys nobody will ever tune.