Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a bird with spread wings on the upper arm, surrounded by jagged black lines that look like cracked skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird emerging from cracked skin on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bird with outstretched wings appears as a pale silhouette in the centre of the design, surrounded by sharp black spikes and shards that suggest broken skin. The shading moves from solid black at the edges to soft grey near the wing shapes, and the bird's form is left as bare skin. The tattoo sits on the upper arm of a person wearing a white short sleeve, with a blurred background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, I know you think I've lost my nerve since the Ashby job, but listen. It's gone half two and I'm sat in the workshop above the bakery on Corn Street, the only light the lamp over the lead bench, and the window from St Aidan's is lying face up on the trestles like a patient. The gale took out the north lancet on Tuesday. Everyone assumed the glass would be dust. It wasn't. It split in a star, shards pointing outwards as if something had tried to leave through it from the inside.

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Then the thing I actually wanted to tell you. When I lifted the largest piece, the one with the old dark paint, I saw the bird. Not painted. The glass around it had been blackened by a fire centuries back, and the cracks had run round a clean pale shape, a dove with its wings flung wide, the way you'd draw one on a child's slate. Every edge of the dark was torn and jagged, and the bird sat in the middle of it bare and untouched.

Mr Pryce from the diocese rang at midnight asking whether I could simply reglaze the lot in clear. I told him no. I've spent the evening tracing the break lines onto greaseproof paper, one feather at a time, and I'm going to leave that bird exactly where the storm left it.

Come up on Sunday. Bring the good solder.

Love, Mags

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