Watercolour style bird tattoo in blue, red, orange and green with loose black linework, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour bird tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large bird in flight is drawn with loose black outline strokes and filled with bursts of blue, purple, red, orange, yellow and green. The colour washes bleed beyond the linework, giving a painterly, unfinished effect. The bird spans the side of the torso, with its wings spread upward and its tail feathers trailing down toward the lower ribs.

Fine line Ribs Bird Wing Feather

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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 sign on the Halfway Motel had been a heron once, or so Dolly Marr swore, and by the time I drove out from Tonopah to repaint it, the bird was only a grey ghost on a rusted frame. I brought three tins of cobalt, a jar of madder and a brush with a split ferrule, because the owner had asked for something that looked like it was still moving.

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I worked through the morning with the road shimmering ahead of me. A lorry passed every twenty minutes and nobody slowed. When I began the wings I let the paint run the way the wind wanted, blue bleeding into violet, violet into the orange of a dust storm I had watched roll over the ridge the summer before. I drew the outline in black first, quick and broken, then flooded the colour in after, and the lines sat on top of the wash as if they were trying to keep up.

By noon the bird was airborne above the car park. Dolly came out with two glasses of iced tea and stood with her hand over her eyes, looking up. She said she had expected it to look finished. I told her it wasn't meant to be. A bird that's done has nowhere left to go.

That evening a wind came off the flats and the wet paint began to drip, a bright green thread running down the post. Dolly laughed and said the bird had started its migration early. I packed my tins, and in the rear-view mirror the sign caught the last of the light, its colours spilling past their lines toward the road, as if it might follow me out of town.