Illustrated tattoo on a forearm showing a large-eyed girl in a crown with patterned birds and an arrow, in a dotwork and geometric style.

Illustrated girl and birds on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a large-eyed girl with a crown and patterned clothing, flanked by two stylised birds with scale-like wings and an arrow. The linework is sketchy and combines dense dotwork stippling and hatching with geometric panels and small clouds. Muted teal, orange and blue scales sit against black and grey shading, and the design runs down the forearm.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Girl Crown Bird Arrow Cloud Geometric pattern Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hens have stopped laying since the first hard frost, and your father says it is the cold that keeps them, but you know better. You have been walking the top field at dawn with a crown of baler twine on your head, because the twine was the only thing in the barn that looked like gold. The frost lies on the stubble in tiny dots, and every breath you let out hangs in front of you like a small grey cloud that refuses to leave.

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On the third morning the two birds are waiting on the gatepost. They are not any birds from the yard. Their wings are laid over with scales, teal and orange and a blue like the inside of a bottle, and their tails are cut into neat panels like a patchwork quilt. The bigger one tilts its head at your crown and says nothing, which you take as agreement. The smaller one drops an arrow at your boots, its shaft striped black and its feathers tipped white, and then both of them lift off towards the wood.

You follow the arrow. It is an old one, the kind your grandfather used to shoot at the bales when he was young, and the fletching is damp. Where it points, under the hawthorn, the snow has been swept clean in a rough square, and in the middle sits a box of straw holding a dozen eggs, each one painted with a tiny crown. Nobody on the farm has ever painted an egg. You stand there until the cold makes you stamp, and the snow around you is quiet in the way that only watched things are quiet.

That evening you tell your father the hens are laying again, in a box under the hawthorn, and he does not ask how you know. He only takes the bucket and goes out into the dark, and you watch from the kitchen window as his breath goes up in the lamplight, grey and slow, the same shape as the birds' tails. He comes back with his cheeks red and the eggs cradled in his coat, and he sets them on the table one by one without a word about the crown. You decide that you will wear it again tomorrow.