Black and grey tattoo of a bird with spread wings in fine outline and shading, on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flying bird on the side ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small bird with wings spread wide is shown in flight, with its head turned to the right. The outlines are dark and fine, and the body and wings are filled with soft grey shading and fine stippled detail. The bird sits diagonally across the side of the torso against a plain, slightly blurred indoor background.

Ribs 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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the candle, Brother Oswin has already set one hem alight this week. Now, the bird. Not the great bird of the abbot's dreams, but a small brown thing, no bigger than a fist, that came in through the broken shutter of the scriptorium the winter the river froze to the bridge posts.

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It would not go out again. Brother Hild swept at it with a goose feather and it flew to the top of the lectern and sat there, cocking its head at the page he was copying, as if it could read the Latin. Every morning it was there. Every morning the abbot ordered the shutter nailed, and every morning the nails were pulled out and laid in a neat row on the sill, like coins set aside for a debt nobody had asked to be paid.

Hild, who was a sour man and seldom cheerful, swore the sparrow was a soul waiting for the gate to open. So one dark evening he flung the shutter wide, lit the lamp, and sat down to wait. The bird looked at the snow, looked at him, and then, wings thrown open the full width of the window, it went out over the frozen river as though the air had been laid down for it like a carpet.

Hild never copied another letter. He spent the rest of his days at the water's edge, and when the novices asked what he had seen, he only said the bird had not once looked back. Now, bread, and then to bed. Whoever lets the candle go out pays for the wax.