Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flying bird on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small bird in flight is tattooed on the inside of a wrist, shown with its wings spread and body angled to the right. The outline is dark and fine, and the wings and body are filled with soft grey shading that leaves some lighter areas of skin showing. The bird sits centred on the wrist against a neutral, slightly blurred background, with a hand and teal nail polish in the upper part of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Bird Flying bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird came off the shooting gallery on the last night at Cleethorpes, when the wind off the estuary was cold enough to make the lads swear over the tent pegs. It was a grey wooden pigeon no longer than my hand, with its wings cut wide and its body painted soft ash, gone pale on the belly where the rain had got at it. Dad had carved it the winter I was born, and it had sat on the top rail for as long as I could remember, turned to face the crowd as if it meant to lift off.

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On the Monday I found it wedged under the caravan step, one wing snapped at the joint. I sat on the wet grass with it in my lap and tried to work out who would notice a bird gone from a gallery that had been losing pieces for forty years. Nobody, probably. But Mrs Tully from the dodgems said anything that had once been meant to fly deserved a proper send-off, and she always had opinions about things with wings.

So we walked down to the sea wall at dawn, the whole fair in dressing gowns and borrowed wellies. I had mended the wing with carpenter's glue and a splint of matchstick, and Dad held the pigeon up against the pale sky. For a moment it looked like a thing that could go. Then I let go, and it dropped straight into the shallows.

It bobbed, turned once as if considering its options, and the tide carried it out past the groyne, grey on grey, until I couldn't tell it from the gulls. Dad said it was the best flight it had ever made. I didn't argue. We struck the gallery that afternoon and left one hook empty on the rail, and I still look for that gap every time the wind comes up off the water.