Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a woman's face and a small songbird on the upper arm, with splashes of red, blue and teal.

Watercolour woman and bird on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large tattoo on the upper arm shows a woman's face with red lips and eyes, framed by loose splashes of red, blue, teal and yellow paint. A bird with orange and red plumage sits on a dark branch to the right, with fine dark linework and a thin looping line below. The vivid colour ink dominates, and the design fills the upper arm against a dark sleeveless top.

Upper arm Woman Face Portrait Bird Songbird Lip Branch

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the backdrop is a lie on your first Saturday, when Mr Vosper hands you a brush no thicker than a matchstick and tells you the sea never stays one colour for long. The Ballroom at Saltcombe Pier has a painted curtain of the harbour that the band plays in front of, and the faces he wants for the lower panels belong to dancers who passed through the place and went home. You paint them from memory, from the ghosts of waltzes.

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Dora Lusk sings there on Thursdays, with lipstick the red of a warning and a voice that makes the glass chandeliers tremble. She says the bird on the rail outside the stage door is a linnet that came in off the sea in March and never left. It only sings, she claims, when someone in the room is telling the truth. You don't believe her, but you watch it anyway while you mix teal with a little ochre and try to get the eyes right.

Then the October storm comes up the front steps and into the hall. Water climbs the painted harbour and every colour starts to run. Dora's face slides down the board in rivers of crimson and blue, and you stand knee-deep with a rag, trying to hold back what can't be held. The linnet lands on the highest beam, opens its throat, and sings one clean phrase, and the water seems to pause long enough for the paint to gather itself back into a mouth.

By morning the board is stiff and streaked, the faces half gone. Only the bird is left whole, orange as a struck match on its dark branch. When you lift your brush to start again, it turns its head and looks straight at you, as if you still owe it a note.