Neo-traditional tattoo of a yellow songbird carrying a red banner with lettering, with black sprigs, on a person's upper back near the shoulder.

Yellow songbird with banner on shoulder

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A yellow songbird with black-outlined wings and tail flies across the skin, carrying a red ribbon banner with lettering in black across its body. Black sprigs with dotted berries curl out from the bird and the banner. The linework is bold and the feathers use yellow with black and orange shading, while the banner is flat red with a light highlight.

Neo-trad Traditional Shoulder Back Bird Songbird Banner Lettering Ribbon Feather Sprig Berry Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the pair of you, and stop picking at the sausage rolls. You want the story of Frankie Doyle's bird? Thirty-one years since we left Aldworth Comprehensive and not one of you has ever asked me properly. So I'll tell it while the urn's still hot.

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Frankie had a canary called Mabel that she kept in the window of the chip shop on Brindle Road, where her dad fried for forty years. Every morning Mabel sang over the vinegar and the wet cardboard, and every morning Frankie swore she'd let her out one day. Nobody believed her. Least of all Frankie, who got married at nineteen to a lad who sold carpets and never once opened a door for her that she hadn't already pushed.

The summer we sat our O levels, the window was open for the first time in living memory, and Mabel was gone. Frankie stood on the pavement with a length of red cloth from her mum's sewing box, tied to the bird's leg like a letter, and she said, so it goes, and she didn't cry, not in front of us.

I won't pretend I know where that canary ended up. Somebody said Cornwall. Somebody said a hedge behind the bingo. But last Christmas a postcard came to my nan's address, yellow as a pound of butter, with a bird on the front and no name on the back. Just the three words, in pen. So it goes.