Black and purple line drawing of a stylised bird, a flower and feathers with dotwork bubbles, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird, flower and feathers tattoo design

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

The design combines a stylised bird head, a large flower with a dotted centre, and long feathers with patterned detail. A cluster of dotwork bubbles fills one upper section, and purple ink splashes run through the composition. The fine black linework is set against a plain white background, with purple shading and accents.

Dotwork Botanical Bird Flower Feather Dot Bubble Splash Bloom

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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

Pick up the last of the Bramley windfalls before the wasps find them, Tomas, and mind where you tread. The old man who planted these trees used to say the ground under an orchard keeps every fall it is given, and sooner or later it pays you back, though never in the coin you expect.

Keep reading

Down by the pond there was a bird with a head like a folded fan, its feathers grey-black at the root and a bruise of violet at the tips. Every August it came up out of the reeds with a mouthful of bubbles, little silver rings it blew from its beak, and it strung them along the bare branch of the medlar like beads. The miller's daughter, Edie, thought them a nuisance. She swept them off the path each morning, and each morning the bird rebuilt them larger.

One evening, when the mist lay low over the rows and the apples had gone soft in the grass, Edie found a dahlia growing where she had flung a plum stone in a temper. Its centre was a dark dotted eye. The bird landed on the gatepost beside it, bowed its head, and dropped a single purple feather at her feet. Edie carried it home, and the next morning the bubbles on the medlar were gone and the pond had gone quiet.

Nobody in the village believed a word of it, but the feather still hangs above the back door, and the dahlia comes up every year whether anyone plants it or not. Now take this jug to the table and pour slowly, because the juice runs as purple as ink when it hits the cloth, and that is the bird's mark on the day's work.