Traditional style tattoo of a hawk perched on a red flower with black feathers, bold outlines and red and grey shading, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hawk perched on a red flower on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A hawk stands on a large red flower with a dark centre, with feathers fanned out beneath it. The bird is drawn with bold black outlines, with red and grey shading on its wings and head. The design is set against a plain skin background, with the flower and feathers filling the lower half of the forearm.

Traditional Forearm Bird Flower Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls owned the fish market by dawn, but the hawk owned the roofs, and everyone in Porthcary knew it was Ada Tregear's bird. You are twelve the summer she lets you carry its jesses down the quay, and you learn quickly that the bird watches the water the way your father watches the sky, without blinking and without hurry.

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Ada grows dahlias behind the net loft, red ones with dark centres, and every evening she cuts one and pins it to the wall above the slipway for the boats going out. Nobody asks why. You ask once, and she says a hawk will sit on anything red if it believes the red is alive. You think she is teasing until the morning the bird drops onto a bloom lying in the gutter and stays there so long the tide turns under it.

When the Mary Jane fails to come in with the fleet by dawn, the fog lies thick on the bay like wet wool. Ada says nothing. She slips the hood from the hawk and holds out her gloved arm, and you run the length of the harbour wall with its weight on your wrist, your breath loud in your ears. The bird goes up into the grey and circles so low over the rocks that its shadow crosses your face.

You hear the men shouting before you see them, three figures waist-deep at the lee of the breakwater, one of them waving a red oilskin. The hawk drops a single feather onto the wet stones at your feet. Ada picks it up, tucks it into the band of her hat, and walks back up to the loft without looking at the water again.