Black blackwork tattoo of a bird in flight above bare trees on the inner forearm, fading to solid black near the wrist.

Bird over forest silhouette on forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo on the forearm shows a bird with spread wings flying above a row of leafless, tangled trees. The trees are rendered as solid black silhouettes that fade into a dense black band towards the wrist, which has ragged, uneven edges. The image is black and grey, with a grainy, muted photographic tone and a blurred indoor background.

Blackwork Forearm Bird Tree Forest Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Carrick had counted the birds over the Skerra headland every morning for eleven years, and the rook that landed on her sill that March was the wrong colour for a rook. It sat with its wings half open, as if it had come down on something it did not trust, and she knew before she reached for the shutter that someone on the mainland had died.

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The island had one ferry, a timber boat called the Hesper, and one rule, handed down by her grandmother: a bird that arrives unasked must be sent back with a name. So Nell tied a strip of oilcloth to its leg, wrote her brother's name on the inside in pencil, and watched it lift away over the stunted pines that the wind had combed flat for two hundred years. The trees below the cliff stood bare and crooked, their branches raised like hands, and the bird cut across them until it was only a black mark against the grey.

Three days later the Hesper came in low in the water, and Tom stepped off it looking nothing like a man who had been to a funeral. He had been in the hospital at Kelder, sitting by a bed that was not his father's, and the rook had perched on the rail outside the ward window the night before. The nurse had said it was a sign of luck. Tom said he had not believed her, but he had not been able to make it leave.

They walked the path up past the wall together, and at the bend where the trees gave out Nell stopped to look back. The dark was already creeping down the slope past the last pines, the way it always did towards evening, and the bird sat on the highest bare branch as though it meant to stay.