Black and grey realism tattoo of a bird in flight carrying a dreamcatcher with feathers, across the upper back of a woman with her head turned away.

Bird with dreamcatcher on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large bird in flight, with detailed feather work on its outstretched wings, holds a dreamcatcher with trailing feathers in its beak. Soft grey shading and fine hatching build up the plumage and give the wings a sense of depth, with faint swirling lines behind the figure. The design covers much of the upper back, and the subject is shown in black ink and greys only.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, don't look at the gulls, they're only gulls. I'm talking about the black bird that came over Skerry Haven the spring the Mary Ann went down. Wings longer than a rook's, spread wide enough to shade the slipway, and it had a thing hanging from its beak: a hoop of willow with a web strung across it and grey feathers trailing off like a skirt.

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Old Tam Greig swore that bird took his son's boat out past the bar. Me, I think it was only a bird with a sense of mischief. It flew low over the harbour, circled the nets drying on the poles, and let the hoop drop right at the feet of Ellen Parr, who was sixteen and hadn't said a word to anyone since her father's funeral.

She picked it up. Caught in the web was one feather, and when she held it to the light the threads took the morning like spider silk. That night she dreamed the sea lay flat as a slate, and in the morning every hull in the fleet came back to the quay. The weather turned foul the day after, and nobody was out in it.

So when you hear wings over the harbour, you hold your tongue and you keep a hoop of willow by the door. Not for luck, mind. Just so the bird knows someone here still remembers what it carried.

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