Black and grey geometric songbird tattoo with dotwork shading on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric songbird on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small songbird faces left and is perched with its feet resting on a thin line at the bottom of the design. Its body is divided into angular geometric facets, with dense dotwork stippling and fine linework creating the shading. The tattoo is rendered in black and grey on pale skin, with a blurred blind in the background.

Geometric Dotwork Upper arm Bird Songbird Geometric shape Polygon

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyor's girl had been sent up Carrow Lane with a theodolite and a sack of pegs, because the parish wanted the wood measured before the new road took it. She counted forty-one oaks and one thrush that would not hold still. Each time she sighted the instrument on it, the bird had shifted a hand's width to the left, as though it knew the angle she needed.

Keep reading

On the third morning she gave up on the measuring and drew it instead. She cut the bird into panes the way the glazier in Saltersford cut church glass: one line through the breast, another from wing to tail, until every feather lay inside a shape she could name. She stippled the mottled throat with the tip of her pen, because the glazier had taught her that light needs something to catch on. The thrush sat on the bottom rule of her page and let her finish.

When she walked back down to the village the crews were already at the wood's edge, chalking numbers on the trunks. The foreman asked what she had found. She turned the page round. He studied the lines for a long time, then the oaks behind her, and said the wood had a shape too, and she could have it if she liked. She said no, and kept the drawing.

That night she pinned it above the window. The lamp swung in the draught, and for a moment the bird seemed to lift off the rule, every facet of it tilting toward the glass, before the flame settled and it sat still again, as if it had only been counting her.