Two origami-style birds in black linework with blue, teal and pink watercolour fills, tattooed on an upper arm.

Watercolour origami birds on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Two geometric paper-folded birds are drawn in bold black outline, with the upper bird facing left and the lower bird facing right. Their panels are filled with soft watercolour washes in magenta, violet, turquoise and green, with the colour bleeding past the lines in places. The design sits across the upper arm and is photographed against a plain pale background.

Geometric Upper arm Bird Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit where the lamp reaches, child, and mind the bucket, the roof still drips over the table where the wind got under the slates. I'll tell you about the Tallis sisters, who lived at the far end of Eilean Dubh and quarrelled over one thing only, which was paper.

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Their father had been the ferryman, and when he drowned off the Stone Skerry the sisters inherited his dinghy with its split seat and a sack of old ledgers from the mainland post office. Ruth could never bear to waste a page. She folded the ledgers into birds, sharp-winged things with their necks bent just so, and set them along the sill for the wind to take across the sound. Nell, the younger, wanted the birds to go somewhere. She painted them with dye boiled from lichen and bramble, magenta where the sun came up, green where the rocks went under the tide, and turquoise for the sea she had never once been brave enough to cross.

One February a storm pinned the sisters indoors for nine days. On the tenth morning Ruth found two birds gone from the sill, one pointed left towards the bay where the boats lay, the other right towards the open Atlantic. Nell swore she had not touched them. Ruth laughed and said the birds had simply grown tired of waiting.

Forty years later a letter arrived at the island post office addressed to a woman nobody remembered, with a single green wing pressed inside, dry as a leaf in a book. The clerk on the mainland knew nothing of it. But the sea had kept the colours, and the birds, I'm told, are still out there somewhere, one of them turning back for the other every time the tide turns.