Two open palms with black fine-line tattoos of birds, one bird spanning both hands on a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird tattoos across two palms

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two open palms face the camera against a near-black background, with a detailed bird tattoo across them. The bird is drawn in fine, hatched black linework with feathers and a long pointed beak. The image is in black and grey and is composed so the tattoo runs across the join of the two hands.

Fine line Hand Bird Feather Palm Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire won't warm the back of you. You want to know how the snipe came over Gallow Pass? My grandmother had it from her grandmother, and she never told it the same way twice, so forgive me if I get the weather wrong.

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Two brothers kept sheep on either side of that pass, and they had not spoken since the spring their father was buried in the wrong valley. Nobody living remembers who put him there. The eldest, Tomas, walked the north path each evening with a lantern to count his ewes in the dark, and the younger, Iolo, did the same on the south path. Every night they saw each other's light across the col, and every night they turned their backs on it.

Then came the October the snow shut the pass early. A snipe, a small brown thing with a beak longer than its head, was caught in the drift between them, too spent to lift. Tomas reached it first. He could not have said why he cupped it so carefully, but when he looked up, Iolo was standing at the boundary stone with his own hands held out, palms up, as if he had been waiting his whole life to be asked.

Here is the part the old ones argue over. Some say they met in the middle and the bird passed between them like a coin. My grandmother said they never touched at all. The snipe walked from one palm to the other, feathers catching the lamplight, and it was Iolo who laughed first, then Tomas. By morning the snow had gone off the bird, and the brothers were carrying the same lantern down the same side of the hill.