Black ink drawing of a bird of prey in flight, its wings and body filled with pine trees and small birds scattering from the wingtip, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Bird of prey with pine forest in its wings

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bird of prey in mid-flight is drawn in black ink with its wings and body filled by a stand of tall pine trees. Small birds break away from the upper wing, and the feathers are built from fine hatching and stippled dots. The design is in black ink on white paper, with the bird centred and the wing spread diagonally across the frame.

Dotwork Eagle Pine tree Forest Feather

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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

The ink has gone thick again, so you thin it with rainwater from the gutter outside the scriptorium, the way Brother Oswin taught you before his chest gave out. Beyond the window the ridge above the abbey is dark with pines, and somewhere past them the eagle that nobody has seen for three winters is either a rumour or a warning, depending on who is talking. The cellarer says the timber would roof the new granary. The abbot says the trees were planted by men who are long dead and are owed their quiet.

Keep reading

You are told to draw the bird for the book of hours, to show the brothers that the old stories were true. So you sit with the nib and begin where you always begin, with the feathers, because feathers are patient. Hatch them close, then stipple the shoulders until the paper looks like frost. Somewhere in the third hour the wing you are building stops being a wing. The strokes lean upright into trunks. The pale gaps open into a glade, and the tips of the primaries bristle into spruce-dark needles you did not mean to make.

When the bell calls you to vespers, the drawing is still wet, so you leave it on the sill with a stone on each corner. In the morning the small birds you scattered above the wing have moved, a few more of them, lifting off the ridge in a loose string towards the valley. The cellarer climbs the stairs with his measuring cord and stops in the doorway. He does not ask about the drawing. He stands a long time looking at it, then at the window, then at the ridge, where the pines still stand, every one of them.