Fresh black blackwork tattoo of a stylised bird silhouette on an upper arm, being worked on by a tattooist wearing black gloves.

Black bird silhouette tattoo being inked on an arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattooist in black gloves works on a pale arm resting on white paper in a black tattoo chair. The tattoo is a solid black silhouette of a stylised bird with angular, pointed wings and tail, with fine grey tonal detailing inside the wings. The image is in black and grey, with the dark chair and clothing filling much of the frame.

Blackwork Upper arm Bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been counting the swifts since Lent, and by the feast of St Cuthbert there were eleven of them screaming round the bell tower of Holm Abbey like thrown knives. He was supposed to be cutting lead came for the east window, but his hands kept drifting to the sketchbook on the bench. Every swift he drew came out the same: wings swept back to sharp points, a tail forked like a tailor's shears, the whole bird flat and dark as a cut-out.

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Prior Gerald did not hold with birds in the sanctuary. He said so on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, while the swifts went in and out through the louvres above the choir stalls and dropped feathers on the psalters. Anselm bargained with him. Give me four weeks, he said, and the glazier's bill would be paid from the wool of the lower meadow. Gerald looked at the sketchbook for a long moment and sighed through his nose.

On the last night of the month Anselm climbed the tower with a candle in a jam jar and a pot of soot-black paint. He painted the shapes onto the old oak louvre boards, one bird to each slat, and shaded the inner wings with a grey wash he had mixed from ash and goat's milk. Below him the bell rope hung still in the dark, and the boards gleamed like wet slate.

By Compline the swifts had found the painted birds. They came down through the gaps in a rush, banked once above the choir, and settled against the boards wing to wing, until the whole tower looked as though it had been stitched with ink. Gerald climbed up at dawn to see the damage and stood there a long while. Then he asked Anselm, very quietly, where he had bought the paint.