Fine line black and grey geometric tattoo of a spread-winged bird above stacked inverted triangles and a downward arrow, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird above stacked triangles on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A spread-winged bird sits at the top of a design of stacked inverted triangles, with circles overlapping the wings and body. The linework is fine and precise, with some soft shading in the bird's feathers, and the triangles are drawn in clean single lines. The tattoo is in black and grey ink and is centred on the forearm against a plain, pale skin background.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Bird Wing Triangle Circle Arrow Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hawk came down over the quarry at twenty past four, and Edith Harrow wrote the minute in the margin of the survey book because nobody else on the Carrow estate would have thought it worth the ink. She had spent three weeks measuring the slope for the new cart road, and the bird had spent three weeks measuring her. It sat on the same dead ash each afternoon with its wings held out flat as a pair of tailor's shears, and it never once looked at the instruments.

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Her father had taught her that any field could be divided into triangles that closed without remainder, each one pointing down, the way water wants to go. She began drawing them over the bird's outline: a wide one for the span of the wings, a narrower one for the body, a third for the place where the hawk folded its feathers before it dropped. By the second week the circles had crept in too, struck with the brass compass that had been his, each touching the next, so that the bird seemed to wear a row of coins across its chest.

On the Thursday the hawk did not come. Edith waited on the ash stump with her boots in the wet grass until the light turned the colour of weak tea. Then she walked the line she had drawn from the highest triangle down to its single point, and found the arrow at the bottom aimed at a spoil heap where somebody had dug years ago and never filled the hole.

She sent the survey to the county with the road routed round the heap, and beneath her signature she drew one more small arrow, dropping straight down the page. The clerk who filed it asked what it was for. Edith said it marked where the bird had left its measurement, and he filed it without comment, which was the only sensible way to file anything with a hawk in it.