Black fine line tattoo of a face with a dove in flight above it, drawn in a single continuous outline on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dove and face line drawing

Fine line · Black and grey · Photo

A single dove in flight forms the upper part of the design, with its wings spreading across the top of a stylised face. The face is drawn in simple, continuous black outlines with almond-shaped eyes, a straight nose and a small mouth. The ink is black on pale skin, and the image is a close, straight-on view of the tattoo.

Fine line Dove Bird Face Portrait Line art

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fleet had been out nine days when the dove came down on the mast of the Ellen Hosking, pale blue-grey and settled as if it had paid for the place. Skipper Abel Rowse took his cap off to it. Nobody on the Hosking had seen a bird so far west of the Scillies, and the men began to mutter that it was a bad sign, until the boy Tam pointed out that a sign only meant something if you knew which way it pointed.

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The bird would not leave. When the Hosking turned for home, the dove went ahead of her, low over the water, and when the fog came down thick enough to swallow the bow, it wheeled back and called until the men could hear it through the grey. Rowse had a wife on the quay at Newlyn named Hester, who fed every gull in the harbour and knew each one by its torn feather. He said nothing about her. He only steered by the sound.

They raised the harbour wall at dusk. The dove flew past the lamp and over the slate roofs and lit on the sill of the Rowse house, where a single candle was burning behind the glass. Through the window a woman's face turned towards the boats, her eyes narrowed from watching the water. Tam swore she moved her lips the way the bird's beak did, but that is the kind of thing boys swear.

The dove left the sill when Hester opened the door. It rose over the mast of the Hosking, circled once, and flew out to sea where the sky was clearing. From then on, the women of Newlyn counted the birds before they counted the men, and nobody ever again thought a dove was only a dove.