Black and grey tattoo of a heron with a long beak and slender legs, drawn in fine engraved linework and stippling, on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heron standing on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall heron stands in profile with its neck curved back and its head turned to the left, shown in a detailed engraved style. The feathers are built up with fine hatching, cross-hatching and stippling, with darker shading along the wing and neck to give volume. The design is entirely black and grey on pale skin, and the bird fills most of the frame against a plain background of skin and a striped top.

Forearm Bird Feather Wing Beak

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 heron came to the Michaelmas fair the way the rain did, uninvited and standing about in the wet. My father found it on the second night, perched on the rim of the dodgems, watching the lamps come on one by one with its neck folded back like a letter nobody had finished.

Keep reading

We were a small outfit: three rides, a coconut shy and a tea tent that smelled of onions. We moved every fortnight along the back roads of the Fens, and the heron followed us from field to field, always keeping to the drains. Dad said herons were bad luck to shoo and worse to feed, so we did neither. Mum swept its droppings off the Waltzer each morning and called it the Auditor, because it stood so still over the takings. At dusk it walked the length of the ground with its long legs lifting out of the mud, as if it were picking its way through a hymn book somebody had dropped in a puddle.

In September Dad sold the Waltzer to a man from Lincoln who wanted to paint it orange. The last night we struck the tent in sleet, and in the morning the bird was gone. I looked for it all the way to the Wisbech road, and I found it at the final field, standing in the black water of the drain with its head turned back towards the empty ground where the music had been. It didn't startle when I came near. It just turned its head to the left, the way it had always watched the lights go out, and waited for me to say something I couldn't think of. Then it lifted, slow as a sheet off a line, and went over the hedge towards the river. I stood there holding a coconut shy prize, a plaster swan, until the cold got into my hands.