Black ink line drawing of a bird in flight with a small leafy sprig below it, on a cream background, in a loose fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird in flight with a sprig

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A loose black ink line drawing of a small bird with its wings raised in flight, its head turned to the right and a single dark eye visible. Below and to the left, a short sprig with a few leaves trails away from the bird's tail. The linework is sketchy and varied in weight, set against a plain cream background with no shading or colour.

Fine line Bird Flight Sprig Leaves Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come down on Saltergate market for three days, and by the third the stallholders had stopped pretending it would clear. Tilly Vane sat under her cheese tarpaulin counting coins she did not have. Her father had owed the man at the corner stall for a winter's wool, and that man had made it plain he would take the cart and the scales before the month was out.

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On the Thursday a small bird came down out of the grey and settled on the rail above her. It was thin and wet as a glove, its wings lifted as though it had only just stopped falling. In its feet it held a sprig of hawthorn, three leaves still green and the rest trailing behind like a loose thread. It did not sing. It turned its head and looked at her with one dark eye, as if it were waiting to be asked.

"Go on then," Tilly said, because there was nobody else to say it to. The bird let the sprig drop onto the wet boards, rose over the stalls and went off towards the broken wall of the old abbey. Tilly picked the hawthorn up. It had been cut from the hill above the mill, where no one had gone since the landslip.

She carried it through the mud at dusk and pushed the stem into a crack in the wall where the gutter ran. On Saturday the man from the corner stall came under her tarpaulin with his ledger, saw the green shoot beside the drain, and said nothing at all. He tore the page out and let the rain take it. By spring the hawthorn had rooted itself in the stone, and its leaves were dripping on the cobbles below.