Solid black silhouette of a bird in flight, with spread wings, tattooed on the side of an ankle, against a blue sky and trees.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flying bird silhouette on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a bird with outstretched wings, shown in flight, sits on the side of a bare ankle and foot. The tattoo is filled with flat black ink, with no visible shading or fine detail, and the bird's wing tips taper to sharp points. The background shows a blue sky, distant hills and green foliage, with the photograph taken in bright daylight.

Ankle Bird Silhouette 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 down, sit down, the bench is dry even if the weather isn't. You want the one about the swallow? Everyone at this crossing knows it, though the guards pretend they don't, because the bird has flown over their heads every April for longer than any of them has had a moustache.

Keep reading

Back when the frontier was only a line of white posts in the reeds, there was a customs man named Teodor Vanek who counted everything that moved. Sacks, goats, letters, the cough of an old lorry. He wrote each thing in a ledger with a steel nib that scratched like a mouse. One spring a bird came over the water with its wings held out flat, black as a burnt match, and it never once dipped to land on his side or the other. Teodor wrote it down. Bird, one. Direction, west. He wrote it again the next day, and the next, until his ledger had more swallows in it than lorries.

His daughter Marta was nine and thought the ledger the dullest book in Europe until she started drawing the bird in its margins. She named it Kašpar, after the ferryman who drowned in the spring flood. Her father laughed and did not cross it out.

Then came the winter the posts were moved a kilometre east, and Teodor was sent to the new hut. The bird kept coming to the old crossing, circling over empty reeds. Marta said it was looking for her father. Teodor said birds do not look for anyone. He walked back once and found a single black feather caught on the broken barrier, and he pressed it between the pages at the place where Kašpar's name was written.

So when you cross tomorrow, look up. The wings are only ink on a page, same as that feather was, but hold your hand flat against the sky and you will see where he stopped pressing down.