Black and grey blackwork tattoo on an upper arm showing a stylised bird with a fanned feather crest, a peony and small arrows.

Bird and peony on an upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large stylised bird with a fanned crest of feathers fills most of the upper arm, with its head and eye at the lower centre. A peony bloom sits to the left and smaller arrows trail down and out to the right. The work uses bold solid black fills against fine line detail and dotted shading in the feathers, all in black ink on pale skin.

Blackwork Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Bird Peony Flower Arrow Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird came down the chimney on the morning the old king died, and the whole court pretended not to notice it. Mirela, who swept the hearths of the east tower, found it sitting in the cold ash with its crest fanned out like a fistful of black fans, and it looked at her with one round eye as if she were the one who had arrived uninvited.

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Nobody in the palace could agree what it was. The steward said a crow, the cooks said a pheasant gone wrong, and the new queen's astrologer said it was the soul of the dead king wearing an unfamiliar shape. Mirela said nothing. She had carried the king's supper up those stairs for eleven years, and she knew he had kept a jar of peony roots under his bed because he believed they cooled a fever, and that he had never once asked anyone to check whether they did.

She wrapped the bird in her apron and carried it down to the orchard wall, where the peonies had gone to seed. When she set it down among the heads of stripped petals, it shook out its feathers, and the black fills of its wings took the grey light and held it. Then it lifted, not up, but along the line of the wall, the way a thread follows a needle. Mirela watched it go until it vanished behind the pear trees. In the morning the steward found a single arrow fletched with feathers lying on the palace steps, and no one could say who had shot it, or at what.