A watercolour-style tattoo of a bird perched on a thin branch across the ribs, in loose blue, yellow, red and pink washes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour bird on a branch on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A bird with a rounded head and long tail sits on a thin diagonal branch, drawn with loose, feathery linework and soft edges. The body is filled with blended washes of blue, yellow, orange, red and pink, with darker blue strokes defining the wing and tail. The tattoo runs across the side of the ribs on skin, with the branch crossing the frame and a small trailing sprig at the lower left.

Traditional Ribs Bird Branch Songbird Feather Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The songbird came to the wedding at Hollin Farm the morning the river was up, and nobody thought to shoo it out, because it had brought a sprig of willow in its beak and set it down on the trestle beside the bride's hand. Old Mags Tully said that was a bad sign and a good one, and that it depended on whether the sprig was green. It was green. Tam, the groom, picked it up and turned it over the way a man turns a coin he does not trust.

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The bride's name was Ailsa, and she had been promised to Tam since they were children on either side of a stone wall. Their families had argued over that wall for forty years. The bird had been seen on it every spring, and it was said that whoever it sat beside would be the one who did not lie. So when it flew up to the branch of the apple tree above the table and began to sing, every guest stopped chewing.

Tam asked it, plainly, whether he should keep the promise. The bird tilted its head, dropped a feather onto his plate, and flew off towards the hills. Ailsa picked the feather up. It was blue at the tip and yellow at the root, and she said it was the first honest answer anyone had given in that valley.

They say the feather is still kept in the church at Hollin, tucked inside the hymn book, and that when the river is up it takes on the colour of the sky over the wall.