Black ink tattoo of a bird skeleton with feather-like shading on the inner wrist and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird skeleton tattoo on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a bird skeleton in a side-on pose, with the skull, ribs, wing bones and legs drawn as separate bold strokes. Soft, sketchy grey shading fans out from the wings and tail to suggest feathers. The design is shown in sharp focus on the inner wrist and forearm against a pale background.

Forearm Bird Skeleton Bone Feather Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dana Pryce had kept the jotter for twenty-six years, tucked inside the lid of a biscuit tin, and she had brought it to the reunion without quite knowing why. The village hall smelled of squash and floor polish. Someone had strung paper bunting from the stage lights, and the name badges were already curling at the corners.

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Ruth Okafor found her by the urn. "You still draw those skeletons?" she asked, and Dana laughed, because in Year Nine the whole class had been talking about the boy who drew a cat's ribs in his maths book. The drawing in the jotter was a bird done in ballpoint, the skull a hooked beak, the wing bones snapped off like kindling, the legs bent the way a crow's legs bend when it stands on a cold roof. Dana had shaded the feathers with the side of her pencil, a grey smudge fanning from the tail, and that smudge was the only thing Mr Hartley ever praised.

They sat on stacked chairs and went through the list of who had died, who had moved to Canada, who had married the deputy head. Ruth tapped the page. "Hartley's in the car park," she said. "Leaning on a Volvo, smoking. He wants to see it." Dana did not move until the side door creaked and he came in, stooped and slower, his coat still smelling of cold air.

He held the jotter at arm's length without his glasses and said nothing for a long while. Then he admitted he had pinned her bird above his desk until the science block flooded in 1998. "Everyone else drew what was there," he said. "You drew what was about to leave." Dana closed the lid of the tin on her own hands and found they were shaking a little, the way they had at fourteen when he first held one of her pages up to the class.