Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour blue jay on a limb

Colour · Photo

A blue jay in profile faces left, drawn with dark sketchy linework and filled with purple, blue, green and turquoise washes. Loose paint splashes and curved purple and blue lines surround the bird, and the tail fades into green and blue wash at the bottom of the frame.

Bird Feather Splashes Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The jay came to the boarding house in a wicker hamper that smelled of tar and oranges, sent ahead by a cousin in Nova Scotia who had run out of patience with it. You signed for it at the foot of the stairs. The carrier, a boy with his cap pushed back, lifted the lid an inch, then let it fall again. It screams at the gulls, he said, so don't let it near the sea.

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For a fortnight it lived in the back parlour, where the wallpaper was already lifting in lilac curls. It learned the kettle, the shop bell and the cough of the retired purser in room four. Every morning it tilted its head at the bay window, blue as a struck match, and called out a rising whistle nobody had taught it, enough to make the milkman stop on the step. You began leaving the sash open a crack so the cold could get in.

One wet afternoon the wind shoved the window wide and the bird went out over the railings. You ran down the shingle with a tea towel, certain it would drown in the grey chop. Instead it wheeled over the breakers, purple and green catching what light there was, and settled on the wet rail of the pier. When it shook itself, the spray flew off in ribbons of colour, as if someone had flicked a loaded brush across the sky.

It came back at dusk. It didn't want the cage. It sat on the newel post while the purser fed it crumbs from his palm, and when you reached for it, it went up the stairs ahead of you, past room four, to the landing window that faced the sea. You kept that window open all winter, and nobody on Marine Parade ever asked you why.