Two clasped hands showing black wristbands and a black bird silhouette on a forearm, with a colourful sleeve tattoo on a third arm.

Black bands and bird silhouettes on forearms

Blackwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two hands are clasped together, with several arms showing tattoos. The left forearm carries a solid black flying bird with spread wings and two smaller black bird silhouettes below it, plus two black wristbands. A solid black band sits on the wrist of the middle arm, and a colourful sleeve with red, yellow and green tones is visible on the right arm. The photo is taken at close range with a soft, slightly warm light.

Blackwork Forearm Bird Eagle Silhouette Band Hand Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third morning the swifts did not come back to the eaves of Pell's Cottage, so Agnes went out to the bottom orchard with a pair of shears and a length of black cloth torn from her late husband's Sunday coat. Her son Tom was already at the gate with his bag. She knotted the cloth twice round his left wrist, then once more round the wrist of the younger boy, Ned, who had said nothing since the frost.

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"Keep the bands on until the birds come back," she said. The folk in the valley said that a swift which nested under a roof would always return to it, and that a house which lost its birds would lose its people too. Tom laughed at her, but he did not take the cloth off. Ned traced the knot with his thumb and asked where the big bird had gone.

The big bird was a hawk that had lived in the walnut tree, and it had taken the smaller ones one by one that winter. Agnes had watched it from the scullery window with her hands in the washing water, and she had not stopped it. Now she walked the boys down the lane, past the pump and the blackened hedge, and at the stile she stopped and pointed up at the sky where a single kestrel hung on the wind.

Ned looked at it for a long time. Then he lifted his bare wrist, the one without cloth, and said, "That one's ours now." Agnes did not answer. She went back up the lane alone, and when she reached the house the swifts were circling the eaves again, screaming, as though they had never left.