Back of a person showing a watercolour-style bird tattoo in bright blues, oranges and reds with loose black linework, across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Watercolour bird tattoo across upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

The photograph shows the upper back of a person, cropped at the top so only the back of the head is visible. A large tattoo of a stylised bird or creature with sweeping feathers spans the shoulder blade and reaches towards the spine, with a head and open wing shapes at the right. The design uses loose, painterly brushwork in blue, teal, orange, red and yellow, with black ink washes and sketchy black outlines.

Back Bird Creature Feather Wing Brushstroke Splash

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird was my father's idea, though he never got to see it finished. Mr Hale wanted something painted over the damp patch on the front of the Corn Exchange in Market Deeping, and Dad had the paints lined up in jam jars along the workshop sill above Pritchard's bakery. He sketched the bird in charcoal, rubbed out half of it with his thumb, then sent me up the ladder with a bucket of rainwater, because he said colour would not sit on dry board.

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I laid the blue first, then teal, and let them run together while the wood was still wet. The orange went on in long strokes, so the wings seemed to be dragged across the boards by a wind that had got into the paint. Dad sat on a kitchen chair at the foot of the ladder, smoking, and told me not to fuss the edges. When the smoke from the bakery chimney drifted over the wall, I took a grey wash and let it settle under the shoulder where the head should turn, and he nodded as if I had done it on purpose.

The council came to see it on a Thursday. Mr Hale squinted up at the bird and said it looked as though a fire had got loose in the paint pot. Dad laughed until he coughed, and I did not know whether he was pleased or ashamed. That night he sent me back up the ladder for one last dab of red at the tip of the head, and by the time I came down he had signed the corner with the brush held the wrong way round. At dawn the paint was still tacky, and the rain came in off the fields and ran the colours down the wall into the gutter towards the river, so the bird looked more like flying than anything I have painted since.