Black and grey dotwork tattoo on a forearm showing a crescent moon, a leafy branch with berries, and a bird skull with hanging feathers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and bird skull on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bird skull with a long beak hangs from a leafy branch with berries, with a feather cluster dangling below it on a fine chain-like line. A crescent moon sits behind the branch, its shading built from stippled dots that fade toward the edge. The work is in black ink and greys, set against a red brick wall, with the design wrapping along the arm.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Crescent moon Moon Branch Leaves Berry Bird Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your stool nearer the fire, for the wind is coming off the Hollin and it likes to listen at doors. My grandmother knew the wood at the top of Cold Lane, where the holly grows so thick a cart could vanish in it. She told me there was a bird living in there with a beak as long as a knitting needle, and it sang only when the moon was the thin paring sort, the kind that could cut your thumb.

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The men of Pennick wanted that bird. Josiah Vell offered a shilling to any boy who would bring him its head, so he could nail it above his door for luck. The boys came back with scraped knees and nothing else. Then a girl called Ada Thorne went up the lane alone with a sack of bread crusts and a length of blue thread, and she sat beneath the holly until the moon had worn down to its very last sliver.

The bird came down to her. It did not sing. It only looked at her with eyes like wet coal, and she understood that it was waiting to be asked. So she asked it what it wanted, and it told her the way birds do, by pecking at the thread she had knotted round her wrist. Ada gave it the thread, and it wove the thread through the holly, and the moon, the whole fat moon, swung back up over the hill where it belonged.

Vell never got his bird. Ada was never seen in Pennick again, though some say she married the moon and some say she only went down to the sea. But the skull still hangs in the holly, bare and light as a leaf, with a little tail of feathers on a chain that rings when the wind is right. Walk up Cold Lane on a thin night and you will hear it, and you will know the bargain was kept.