Solid black silhouette of a bird in flight tattooed on the inner wrist, with a book cover visible behind the arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flying bird silhouette on a wrist

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a bird with its wings spread sits on the inner wrist and forearm, drawn as a single filled shape with no interior linework. The ink is dense and even, with a slightly soft edge and a faint sheen on the skin. The bird is placed diagonally across the wrist, and a book cover with a night sky scene sits in the background.

Blackwork Forearm Bird Silhouette Flight Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming down on the Saturday market since seven, and by eleven the gutters ran brown past the fishmonger's crates. You were sheltering under the awning of Mrs Adeyemi's book table, turning over a paperback with a cracked spine, when a bird dropped onto the tarpaulin above your head. It was black all over, not a feather of it lit, and it sat there shaking water from its wings as if the weather had offended it.

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Mrs Adeyemi did not look up. 'That's the one that comes every wet morning,' she said. 'Sings the car alarms back at the car park. Nobody's ever managed to shoo it off.' She slid a book toward you, its night sky faded to blue at the edges, a thin silver crescent hanging over a row of dark trees. 'Mockingbird, my husband called them. They copy everything they hear, then fly off with the best bits.'

You bought the book for two pounds, mostly to stop yourself leaving. The bird watched you pay. When you stepped out from the awning the rain had thinned to mist, and the bird went up off the tarpaulin in one long, unhurried stroke, a flat dark shape cutting across the grey sky above the stalls, heading for the pale light over the rooftops.

That evening you sat with the book on the kitchen table and found the page where the moon hung over the trees. Nothing in it sang. But the silhouette on the cover kept pulling your eye, and you realised you had been tracing its wingspan on the condensation of the window all afternoon, copying it without meaning to.