Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a bird with spread wings above a geometric circle and arrow, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird with spread wings over a geometric circle

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large bird with fully spread wings, possibly a hawk or eagle, is shown head on in the centre of the design. Its feathers are built up from fine stippled dots and short strokes, with darker shading at the wing tips and body. Below it, a thin-lined circle with straight lines, an arrow and a hanging pointed drop sits on pale skin under soft, even lighting.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Bird Eagle Wing Circle Arrow Line Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The theodolite wouldn't sit level on the churchyard wall, so you knelt in the wet grass with the plumb bob swinging from your fist and Mr Pryce hovering behind you with his pipe gone out. Above the lych gate a hawk was turning slow rings over the rooftops of Llanwrin, and every time you looked up it seemed to have drifted a little closer to the spire.

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"Leave the bird be," Mr Pryce said. "Hawks have never once read a county map." You wrote the bearing in your field book anyway: forty-one degrees, a chalk arrow beside it, the line running from the tithe barn through the broken stile to the stone where the Lloyd boys had always argued the boundary sat. Your pencil kept snapping. The weight at the end of the string would not stop trembling.

Then the hawk folded its wings and dropped, not onto a mouse as you expected, but straight down the line you had drawn. It landed on the stone with its wings still half open, as though it were holding the whole valley level. Mr Pryce went quiet. He took the pipe from his mouth and said the Lloyds would have to take it up with the bird.

You moved the boundary peg that evening, four yards east, on the strength of one hawk and a plumb line. Nobody in the Lloyd kitchen argued, and by morning the bird was gone, but the stone was still warm when you touched it, and the string hung perfectly still from your fingers.