Black line drawing of a dove in flight with spread wings and a tapering tail, shown on a plain white background, suitable as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dove in flight line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A single dove is shown in side view, mid-flight, with both wings raised and spread in sweeping, tapering strokes. The bird's head, eye and beak are defined with a few short lines, and its tail and lower wing feathers trail off into fine points. Everything is rendered in solid black linework on a white background, with no shading or colour.

Dove Bird Wing Flight

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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 bird came down on the scriptorium sill just as I was blotting the last line of the Lenten psalter, and at first I took it for a smudge of morning light on the glass. It was no smudge. It folded its wings with the care of a clerk putting away his pens, then turned its head and regarded me with one bright eye, as though it had been sent to inspect my lettering and found it wanting.

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A thread of red wool was knotted round its left leg, and tucked beneath the knot was a strip of vellum no wider than my thumb. Brother Osric always said a message on a bird was the work of either a fool or a saint, and the Abbot had never settled which of us he meant. I unpicked the knot with my smallest penknife while the bird shifted from foot to foot, and read the words in Sister Hild's cramped hand from the house across the fen: The dyke has broken at Wenlow. Come when the water drops, and bring the flight drawings.

I had been drawing birds all winter, the way a man worries a sore tooth. Wings lifted in long tapering strokes, feathers ending in points finer than a hair, because the Abbot said the true mark of a flying thing is the edge where it leaves the air. I had never once got one to hold still long enough to copy. Now here was my model, impatient on the sill, flexing as if it knew exactly what I was failing to do.

I fetched the pen and ink, but by the time I had dipped it the dove had gone, a few black strokes lifting over the water meadows, wings spread as wide as every line I had botched all winter. I left the ink to dry on the nib and walked down to the flooded fields to see where it would land, and found the sky had finished the drawing for me.