Sketchy black linework bird tattoo with orange, grey and red watercolour washes on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour-style bird on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A loose line drawing of a bird, possibly a parrot, sits on the forearm with a grey wash over the head and upper body. Orange, red and small teal accents spread outwards in soft, bleeding patches that resemble watercolour. The thin black outlines are broken and sketchy, and the design fills the centre of the frame against a plain grey top and a pale background.

Fine line Forearm Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Cathcart swore the grey parrot had learned every word the fishmongers shouted and was selling them back to the harbour at a penny a time. That was the summer the bird came off the Lerwick boat in a crate with someone else's name on it, and nobody on Stennis Row would claim it. The crate was lashed to Tomas Rudd's doorstep on a Tuesday, and by Tuesday night he had given up pretending it was not his problem.

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The parrot was not much to look at at first. Its body was a wash of smoky grey, as if someone had dipped a brush in the sea and then thought better of it, and its belly and tail were splashed with orange and a little red, bleeding outward into the feathers like tea into a clean cloth. When it shook itself, a fleck of teal landed on his kitchen table. It ate his porridge, pecked at the clock, and said nothing at all for three days, which Mrs Cathcart took as proof of its guilt.

On the fourth morning it spoke. It did not use the fishmongers' words. It used his mother's, the exact rasp she had once used to call him in from the shingle at dusk, and Tomas stood in his doorway with the milk going warm in his hand and listened to it three times over before he could bring himself to open the back door.

At low tide he carried the cage down to the slipway and undid the latch. The parrot climbed to the rim, looked at the grey water, then at him, and said his name once more, softer, as if it were making sure he had heard. Then it lifted off over the boats, a dab of orange going out across the flat sky, and Tomas stood on the wet stones until there was nothing left of it but the sound of the gulls.