Black and grey geometric thunderbird tattoo with spread wings across the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric thunderbird on the inner forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical thunderbird with spread wings, a stylised head and a central chevron body is tattooed across the inner forearm. The design uses bold black outlines, solid black triangles and banded wing lines with grey shading and fine highlights. The bird is centred on a pale skin background against a blurred green backdrop.

Geometric Forearm Bird Wing Chevron Triangle Tribal pattern

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

Harlan Pike had been drafting the ventilation grilles for the Gull Sound ferry since March, and by June the drawing office smelt of linseed and cigarettes and the sea came in under the door whenever the wind swung north. He squared each louvre to the sixteenth of an inch, shading the teeth in black so the foreman could count them from across the room. Nobody had asked him to make the grilles look like anything.

Keep reading

On the Thursday before the launch he laid the sheets side by side on the bench and saw that he had drawn a bird. Two louvred wings ran out level from a stepped spine, a chevron body sat between them, and a hooked head rose from the top, all of it ruled with the same patient hand. Mr Oakes, the foreman, came over with his tea, looked for a long time, and said that a ferry was not a church and a bird on the air vent would be taken for a joke by every cabin steward in the Sound. Pike said nothing. He had already set the sheets to be cut.

The ferry went out in October, and in November a sou'westerly came up the Sound faster than the forecast. Water found the stern hatch, the lower decks filled with a sound like a train in a tunnel, and the pumps could not keep up. The crew who got the passengers into the saloon swore afterwards that the ventilation shafts had drawn the air in a single steady note, the way a gull holds still on a thermal, and that the fumes had cleared while the rest of the ship shuddered.

Oakes never mentioned the bird again. When the ferry was refitted in spring, the new yard man asked whose drawing the grilles were, and Oakes, who had been at the stern that night, said it was the one with the wings on it, and left the sheet where it was.