Chest tattoo of a bird with spread wings in a loose watercolour style, with pink, red and teal washes and black linework.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour-style bird with spread wings on chest

Chest · Mixed · Photo

A bird with wings fully spread is tattooed across the upper chest, with its body centred on the sternum. The wings and body use bold black linework and grey shading, overlaid with loose pink, red, orange and teal washes that fade at the edges. The photo is framed closely on the chest and shoulders, with a dark top at the bottom of the frame.

Chest Bird Wing Watercolour splashes Chest piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird had got in through the loading bay sometime after midnight, and by the time Dev found it, it was perched on the rim of a steel bedpan rack in the corridor outside Ward 9 as if it had been booked in. Nobody else on nights wanted to touch it. Sister Okafor said it was a swallow, or possibly a house martin, and that the sooner it was out the better for everybody.

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I wrapped it in a clean pillowcase from the linen trolley, the way my gran used to carry bees, and walked it up to the stairwell where the high window sticks. The corridor lights hummed. Somewhere a monitor was counting out a man's heart in green numbers, and I kept expecting the bird to hit a pane or a lamp. Instead, when I finally got the sash up and let the pillowcase fall open, it did not go out. It opened itself all at once, wings wider than my arms could make them, and the stairwell filled with pink and rust and that thin teal you only see over the sea before weather.

Okafor had come up behind me with two teas. She watched the bird cross the car park lights toward the dark line of the railway, then looked at my wet sleeve and said nothing about the pillowcase, which I have since decided was a kindness. We drank the teas on the stairs. Neither of us said we were tired.

At six the sky over the bypass had gone the same colours the bird's wings had. I thought about that while I signed off the handover, and I still think about it on nights, when a window sticks and something small is trapped on the wrong side of it.