Geometric bird tattoo with dotwork shading and handwritten script across the shoulder blade, with a dotted-line plant and teal accents down the back.

Geometric bird and dotted plant on a back

Dotwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

A bird made of flat geometric planes, partly stippled with dotwork, sits across the shoulder blade beside handwritten script. Below, a dotted-line plant rises from a teal and black geometric vase, with scattered triangles and squares. The palette is mainly black, grey and grey-toned dots, with teal and mustard accents.

Dotwork Geometric Back Shoulder Upper arm Bird Script Plant Triangle Square Dotted line Tree Geometric shape

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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 reaches the edge of the village before the post does, which is how you know the week has gone wrong. It sits on the fence beside the bakery with one wing built from flat grey planes, and it does not sing. You carry the dotted map Marta drew for you on the back of a seed packet, and you follow the bird's angle east, where the hedges give way to birch.

Keep reading

The forest keeps its paths in dots. Where the ground is soft, someone has pressed small stones in a line, and each stone marks a place where a question was asked and answered badly. You step from one to the next. A square of teal light lies on a stump, and in a clearing a tin vase sits with a crooked stem, and out of it grows a plant made of fine connected points, joined by thread you can barely see. Every point is a thing somebody once tried hard to remember.

The bird waits beside the vase. Its white eye is like a missed stitch, and it tilts its head, asking for what you were told to bring. You have only the seed packet and a sentence you cannot quite finish. So you read the broken words aloud, and the bird takes the sentence as payment, shaking loose a fleck of grey dust that settles on the soil and sprouts, one point at a time, into a small dotted tree.

When you walk home the fence post has its bird back and the bakery smells of bread. Marta asks what the forest wanted. You tell her it wanted the rest of the sentence, and that you are still deciding whether you owe it the ending. She nods as if she has always known, and the bird, perched on the gatepost, turns one white eye towards you and goes quiet.