Black and grey geometric tattoo of a hawk head on a forearm, with a solid black wing shape, pine trees and a thin rectangular frame.

Geometric hawk head on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bird of prey head in profile, built from fine hatched lines, sits at the top of the forearm above a solid black wing-like shape. Pine trees are picked out in the lower left of the black area, and a thin rectangular border frames the whole design. The work is entirely black ink in greys and black, with a clean, angular composition.

Geometric Blackwork Forearm Eagle Pine tree Forest Wing Geometric shape Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hanne kept the barge Wren on the Vale river, and in the stern cabin she kept a hawk on a brass perch. It had come aboard in the hard frost of the year her husband died and would not be persuaded off again. The lock-keepers called it the Warden, because it sat with its head turned to the west bank the way a gatekeeper watches the road.

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The west bank was pine wood, the trees packed so close that the light went green under them and then went out. Boatmen said a man who walked into those pines came out older than he went in. Hanne's grandson Tobin, twelve years old, bet the lock-keeper a shilling that he could fetch a sack of salt from the far side before the tide turned. He slung his boots round his neck by their laces and went in barefoot.

The Warden left its perch for the first time in three years and flew ahead of him, a dark bar between the trunks, calling back whenever he lost it. In a clearing where the needles lay a hand deep, a pale woman sat on a flat stone, combing river weed out of her hair. The salt was already beside her in a sack. She asked what he would give for the way home. He said he had nothing but the shilling. She said the shilling would pay for the salt, but the road back cost something he had not yet noticed he owned.

Tobin came out at dusk with the salt and his boots still round his neck, and the Warden did not return to its perch. It circled the Wren three times, then dropped onto the rail and sat there until morning, its eye on the trees. Tobin never told Hanne what he had left in the wood. But on still evenings, when the sun dropped behind the pines, the barge threw a shadow across the water with a wing folded along its side, and the boy would stand at the rail and watch it until it faded.