Watercolour style tattoo of a bird in flight with orange, blue and purple splashes on the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour bird in flight with splashes

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A small songbird in mid-flight is drawn with loose, sketchy black linework and soft painted shading. Orange, blue, pink and purple washes and ink splatters spread around the wings and tail. The design sits on bare skin and fills the frame, with the tail trailing to the lower left.

Ribs Bird Songbird Splashes Ink splatter Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The finch that lived in the ventilation ducts of the Halden Reach had been dying for a month before anyone noticed it was still there. You noticed, because you scrubbed the filter grilles at the end of each shift, and it was the only living thing aboard that never asked you for anything. Its feathers had faded to the colour of old pipe cleaners. Its song was a rusted hinge.

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On the night the lamps on C-deck failed, you found it hopping along a cable run towards the galley, and you did something foolish. You had a cracked tin of sepia from the hull-paint store and a brush cut from a mop head. Kneeling under the red emergency light, you painted the bird onto the bulkhead beside the hatch, quick and loose. You splashed blue from the coolant dye and orange from the pressure valve stencils. The wet paint ran, and the bird looked as if it were tilting out of the wall.

Forty crew walked past that hatch in the next week. Someone scratched a name beside it. Someone left a sprig of basil in the join of the frame. The real finch finally stopped singing, but a girl from hydroponics began drawing the same wing on her slate every morning, and the captain pretended not to see the violet smudge on the vent cover where her fingers had been.

When the reach docked at Gannet Ring, the customs officer asked what the splashes on the wall were meant to be. You told her it was a bird going somewhere. She studied the paint, then you, and said nobody had ever been able to tell where a bird was going from the mess it left behind. You said that was rather the point. Then you walked out into the bright air, which smelled of something green you had forgotten existed.