Black dotwork tattoo of a stylised bird head with a round eye and feathered lines across the palm and fingers of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotted bird head across the palm and fingers

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised bird head with a round eye and curved feather-like lines fills the palm, with its beak curving toward the wrist. The fingers and the upper palm are filled with dense black dots that give a stippled texture, all outlined in bold black linework. The ink is black only, shown against pale skin and a white paper towel in a close, straight-on shot.

Dotwork Hand Bird Eye Feather Dot Palm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming down on Tanner's Yard since six, hammering the corrugated roof until the stallholders stopped calling out and simply held up their fingers to count the sales. I had a tray of old keys under a sheet of polythene and a woman in a green mac who wanted a key cut for a tin that had no lock anymore. Nothing about the morning was promising, and I was about to tell her so when Mr Okonedo from the end stall came splashing over with a leather tag in his fist.

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"Hold still," he said, and pressed it into my palm before I could argue. It was warm from his pocket. Stamped on the leather was a bird's head, drawn the way the old printers used to draw them, with a round brass rivet for an eye and feathers curling off the beak like smoke. The surface was covered in tiny punched dots, hundreds of them, so the whole thing felt like gravel under my thumb.

"It belonged to a clockmaker who never once got wet," he said. "Keeps the weather off whoever keeps it."

I laughed, and then I stopped laughing, because the rain on the roof seemed to thin out over my stall while it went on pouring over everybody else's. The woman in the green mac got her key, paid in coppers, and went off with her dry tin under her arm. I put the tag down on the tray. The rivet eye was pointing at the drain at the corner of the yard, where the water was rising fast.

By closing time the gutters had burst and half the market was afloat. I picked up the tag to wrap it in a cloth and felt the dots pressing against my fingers, cold and exact, like a count of something I had not yet been told. Mr Okonedo's stall was gone under the flood. Mine was dry.