Pencil sketch of a bird with a raised, feathered wing and clawed talons on cream paper, drawn as a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Diving bird sketch with raised wing

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a bird shown in a diving pose, with one wing raised high and feathers drawn in fine, layered strokes. The talons are detailed at the bottom left, and the body is shaded lightly with soft grey pencil. The drawing is in blue-grey tones on a cream background with no colour ink.

Bird Wing Feather Talon Sketch

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top came down in Tewkesbury with Mercy still on my glove, because nobody had told the men with the ropes that she was not finished. Pemberton had sold the elephants in March and the trapeze rigging the spring before. What was left was a tent with three poles that leaned like tired men, a ringmaster who drank his tea cold, and a falconer's act that had lost its audience one season at a time.

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Mercy used to drop from the top of the rigging like a coat slipping off a hook, wings folded tight, and open them only when the crowd had stopped breathing. Lately she had begun pulling up early, lifting one wing high above her back so the feathers fanned against the canvas. The people in the cheap seats had started clapping for the pause instead of the drop, and Pemberton said that was the same thing as applause, so we kept it in.

That last night the front row held only a boy with a paper cone of chips and his grandmother asleep beside him. I stood under the rigging with the lure swinging from my hand. Mercy came down through the lamplight, folded, and then, at the point where she should have turned, she raised that great wing and kept falling. She went past the lure, past my outstretched arm, and landed on the sawdust with her talons spread like a hand of cards.

She looked at the open flap where the evening was. I unbuckled her jesses without a word. By the time the lorry reached the county road she had gone, and the only thing left in the tent was a single grey feather caught on the guy rope, fine as a pencil line.