Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a songbird with outstretched wings and rainbow paint splashes on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour songbird on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A small songbird with spread wings is shown in flight, outlined in black with soft blue, orange and white fills. Rainbow watercolour splashes in pink, green, yellow and purple drip from the wings and tail across the skin. The bird sits centrally on the upper back against a faint pale pink wash, with the colour spreading outwards around it.

Back Bird Songbird Wing Watercolour Splash Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of October the big top had more patches than canvas, and Mr Greaves had stopped pretending the lions were coming back. What we still had was Pip, a songbird with a blue cap and a rust-orange breast, who flew from the centre pole into the rigging at every matinee and sang over the brass band until the crowd forgot the rain.

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Nobody taught her to fly. She had a broken wing when Lottie found her under a lorry in Carlisle, and she healed crooked but stubborn, and I was the one who splinted it with lolly sticks and paint-stained tape. I mixed the colours for the posters that year, so I knew what watercolour does when it runs: it goes where it wants, and you have to let it, or the picture is ruined before it dries.

The turn came on a wet Saturday in Penrith. Greaves sold Pip to a man in a grey coat for the price of two tyres. I watched her go in a wicker box, singing the whole way to the car park, and I thought that was the end of it. Then on Sunday a postcard arrived from Leeds with a single feather taped to it and a smear of pink paint across the corner, and nothing else.

I still have it. Some nights I pin it beside the poster I painted, the one with the bird spread wide over the ring, and I tell myself she is somewhere with a proper sky, flying on a wing that no longer hurts. Greaves says I am daft. He has never looked at the feather properly, which is green at the tip, the exact green I never managed to mix.