Black ink line drawing of an abstract winged bird with a swirled tail and a column of decreasing dots, on textured white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract winged bird line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black ink drawing of an abstract winged figure, with one wing sweeping up to the left and a curling, looped form to the right. A column of solid dots decreases in size down the body. The linework is smooth and calligraphic in black ink on textured white paper, with no shading or colour.

Wing Bird Swirl Dot Line art Abstract

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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

Mind the third step, it's worn to a dish. Now then, you'll want the lamp lit before the fog comes in off the Skerries, and that's my job, not yours, so sit on the coal scuttle and listen. My uncle Tobias kept this light forty years and never once said a kind word about gulls. Then in the winter of the great storm a gull came crashing against the glass, one wing broken clean, and he carried it down these stairs in his jersey. He set it on the oil drum by the stove and the thing stared at him like he owed it money.

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He fed it pilchards and named it Mrs Pollard, after the postmistress, because it had the same look of disapproval. By March it could fly again, short hops across the kitchen, knocking the kettle lid off. Then one evening it climbed the ladder to the gallery, past the lens, and sat on the rail while the beam swept over the water. It didn't call. It just watched the ships go past at the edge of the light, the way the old keepers used to watch for wrecks.

We found it dead on the rail the next morning, wings folded like a letter nobody sent. Tobias wouldn't let the council men take it. He drew it instead, in black ink on the back of a tide table, the wing swept up as if still going somewhere, a little loop at its tail where the wind had caught it, and a trail of dots falling down like the lights of a boat getting smaller. He pinned it above the stove and said that was the only proper log he'd ever kept.

The lamp's ready now. Go on, pull the chain. Mind the step.