Back and shoulder tattoo of an abstract bird or feather in black linework with teal and pink watercolour splashes, shown in a fine line and geometric style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric bird with watercolour splashes on a back

Fine line · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The photograph shows a woman seen from behind, with a tattoo across her left shoulder blade and upper back. The design is an angular, abstract bird or feather form drawn in thin black lines, with pink and red accents along some edges. Teal and pink watercolour-style washes and dark splatters sit at the neck and within the wing shape.

Fine line Geometric Shoulder Back Bird Feather Wing Watercolour splash Abstract shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swift hit the chapel window at noon, a flat crack that stopped the organist mid-hymn. By the time Hettie Marr climbed the ladder with her tin of putty, the bird was gone and all that remained was a smear of teal on the glass and a single black feather caught in the lead. Her uncle had taught her that glass remembers everything it is asked to hold, and this window had been asked to hold a bird in flight since 1911.

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The panel was a mess of angular shards, the old lead bent like wire coat hangers. Hettie spent the first afternoon lifting out the cracked pieces one by one and laying them on a sheet of baize in the order they came out, because her uncle had also taught her that a broken thing is only a puzzle if you respect where it used to be. The glass was streaked with pink where the sun had caught the leaded edges for a century, and some of the splinters were nearly violet at their thinnest points.

Mrs Okafor from the parish council brought her tea on the second day and asked whether the window could be made to look as it did before. Hettie said it could be made to hold together, which was not quite the same thing. She set the replacement shards in fresh lead, working with a soldering iron that smelled of pine resin, and each time she finished a wing she stepped back to see whether the bird had decided to stay.

On the Friday, the light came through at the hour the swift had struck, and the whole bird lit up across the nave in pieces of teal and rose. Hettie stood beneath it with her hands in her overall pockets. The bird was not quite the bird it had been, but it was a bird again, and somewhere over the rooftops the real one was probably already somewhere else, which seemed to her the right arrangement.