Black and grey geometric flamingo tattoo with dotwork shading on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric flamingo on the ribs

Geometric · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A flamingo standing on one leg is drawn from straight, angular outlines, with the neck curved into a loop at the top. The body and neck are filled with stippled dotwork shading that gives a faceted, dimensional look. The tattoo is in black ink and greys and sits against a pale skin tone, with a white top and dark waistband at the edges of the frame.

Geometric Dotwork Ribs Flamingo Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Hanne, The theodolite froze again this morning, so I have spent the hours sketching instead. The pass sits at nearly three thousand metres, and the only things that move up here are the wind and one bird I cannot name, standing on a single leg in the shallows of the tarn below the cairn. I have been trying to measure it. Every time I set the sight on its neck, the neck has already bent somewhere else.

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Its outline is nothing but straight lines, angled the way the ridge is angled, as though someone had cut it from folded card. Where the neck loops back on itself it makes a hexagon you could hang a lamp from. The body is shaded with dots, thousands of them, thickest on the underside where the snow throws its shadow onto the water. I counted forty dots across one facet before the light went, and gave up at a number I did not trust.

Yesterday the porter, Anselm, swore it was the same bird that stood in the high meadow last August, and that it never walks, it only arrives. I told him the altitude was muddling his arithmetic. He laughed, then asked me to draw it for his daughter, because she believes nothing that cannot be folded flat on a table.

So here is my attempt, pinned under a stone where the wind cannot take it. Tell her the bird keeps its second leg folded away until somebody needs it. The dotwork will fade, I expect, once the sun gets to the paper. The lines will not. Yours, Matthias.