Geometric bird tattoo with dotwork-shaded wings and a red heart on a string, with two small clouds, on the side of the torso.

Geometric bird with red heart on side

Geometric · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A stylised bird in flight is drawn with bold black outlines, with its wings and body filled with geometric patterns, dotwork stippling and cross-hatching. Two outlined clouds sit either side of the bird, and a thin line rises from its beak to a small solid red heart at the top. The bird and clouds are shaded in black and grey, and the composition sits diagonally across the side of the torso against a green garment.

Geometric Dotwork Ribs Bird Heart Cloud Geometric pattern Dotwork Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, because the bit about the bird is the part people always lean in for. My grandmother's neighbour, Mrs Ashdown, kept a garden at the top of Tanner's Lane, and she had a bird that came every morning at seven to sit on her clothesline and complain. Not sing, mind. Complain. A little grey thing with a beak like a folded envelope and a wing cut sharp as a slate roof.

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One February the frost got into her potting shed and killed every seedling she had. She stood in the wreck of it with her hands in her apron and told nobody anything. The bird came down anyway, hopped along the rim of the water butt, and dropped a red haw berry at her feet like a coin. She took that for an insult, I'm told, and threw it at the fence.

But the next morning there was a berry again, and the morning after, and by March she had a row of them lined up on the wall like a sentence she couldn't read. She went to the library in town and asked a man in a cardigan what a bird would want to say with a gift like that. He said she had it backwards. The bird was not giving. It was asking her to stay put and plant something worth the wait.

She did. Forty-one bulbs, every one of them a sort she'd sworn off years before. And the story goes that the first crocus up through the frost was the exact red of that little heart the bird wore on its string, and that Mrs Ashdown never once threw a berry at the fence again.