Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a bird in flight whose wing blends into a bare tree, placed across the upper back below the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird in flight merging into a bare tree

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a bare, leafless tree whose branches rise up the back and neck, with a bird in flight at the right whose wing and body dissolve into the same branching pattern. The work uses fine stippled dots and dark linework, with the bird's wing feathers and the tree's trunk shaded densely while the lighter areas of skin show through. The image is in black and grey, with a soft, dim background and the subject framed from behind.

Dotwork Botanical Back Tree Bird Branches Wing Flight

Find an artist for this

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

The last plane tree on Cable Street was due to come down on Monday, and you were the one the council sent to tape off its roots before the diggers arrived. Nobody else wanted the night shift. By eleven the traffic had thinned to taxis and the odd bus sighing at the stop, and the streetlamp above the tree buzzed like a fly against glass.

Keep reading

The tree was bare, as they all were by November, its branches a fine black net against the orange sky. You noticed the rook on the top limb only because it did not move. Then it lifted, dropped off the branch and slid across the road in a long low fall, wings opening at the last moment so it rose over the bonnet of a parked van and climbed past the flats. You followed it with your torch. The beam caught the trunk, and the shadows of twigs broke up on the pavement like cracked glass.

Your mother had a saying about rooks: they carry the names of the dead up to the roofs. You had thought it nonsense until the nurse rang you at the depot last spring. Now the bird came back, settled on the same limb and folded its wings. Its feathers were scaled with the lamplight, each one a separate scratch of ink in the dark, and the branches seemed to run down into its body and out again, as if the two had grown from one root.

Monday morning the diggers came. You stood at the cordon with your flask and watched the bucket bite the pavement. The rook was gone. But when the first limb cracked and fell, something black went up from the crown, and you swear it turned once over the depot roof before the city swallowed it. You kept the torch. You still tap it twice before you leave a room, to say goodnight to the tree.