Woman in profile with bird and rose on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman's face in side profile with closed eyes, red lips and a rosy cheek, her dark hair swept back and decorated with a pale blue flower and bare branches. A blue bird perches on a branch at the top left, a red rose sits at the top right, and green leaves trail down the lower right. The bold black outlines and smooth colour blends sit on a pale blue and cream background that follows the curve of the arm.

Neo-trad Traditional Upper arm Woman Profile Bird Rose Branches Flower Leaves Hair Lip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, and mind the lamp, it smokes if you turn it up. You want the story of Marta and the blue bird, because your mother tells it wrong. She makes it sound sad. It wasn't sad. It was cold, which is a different thing, and the sea is always cold.

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Marta kept the chandlery on Gull Stair, the one with the bent sign that said ROPE and SALT in the same faded red. Every morning she carried her tea down to the quay, and there was the bird, perched on the one bare branch of the hawthorn that grew out of the fish market wall, singing at nobody. The fishermen said it was an omen. Her husband Tomas said it was a sparrow with ideas above its station. He was wrong about that, the same as he was wrong about the weather and the price of lamp oil.

The spring the boats went out and didn't come back by the Thursday, Marta stopped going down to the quay. She sat at the window with a rose pressed flat inside the Bible, and the bird came to the sill each evening and sat there, quiet for once, watching the harbour lights come on one by one. Nobody on Gull Stair slept well that week. Marta said she slept fine. She said it with her hands folded on the table, the way you'd lay down a card you had already played.

On the Sunday the boats came in low and slow, and Tomas came up the stair with one oar and a face like wet bread. Marta didn't turn round from the window. "It started singing again this morning," she said. "So I put the kettle on for you." Then the bird lifted off over the roofs towards the next harbour, and nobody on Gull Stair ever saw it again.