Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a bird with outstretched wings in a geometric style, placed across the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Geometric bird in flight on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bird with outstretched wings is shown in flight, its body and feathers built from overlapping circular and layered shapes. The outlines are bold black lines, and the feathers and body are filled with stippled dot shading that fades in density across the wings. The tattoo sits across the upper back, with the wings extending towards the shoulders on a pale skin tone against a plain background.

Dotwork Geometric Back Bird Wing Flight Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pigeons went up off the pit top every Sunday, and my grandad counted them out loud as if the sky might try to keep one. Eleven grey birds, and the twelfth was Mab, a hen with a dent in one wing that never healed straight. He said she could find her way home through the smoke if she kept her eye on the winding wheel. I believed him for years.

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The colliery whistle went at six on the Monday, and the lamps came bobbing down Front Street like a string of sparks. Dad went down with the others. The dust got into everything: the bread, the Sunday collar, the loft floor that Grandad swept twice a day and that came back grey by morning. He said coal was only old sky pressed flat and kept in the dark, and that a bird was the one thing that could carry a bit of it back up.

By noon the wheel had stopped and nobody was shouting. Grandad opened the loft door and let them all out at once, the eleven and Mab, and we stood in the yard with our heads back while they circled the headframe in a loose ring, wings spread wide, dark against the spoil heaps. They wheeled over the chapel roof and the wash-house and back again, as if they were counting too.

Mab came in last, low over the slag, and landed on the fence post beside my hand. Grandad fed her the first corn he had, then took his cap off and held it against his chest. Dad came up the next morning in the back of a cart, and Grandad never once asked him where he had been.