Black and grey tattoo of a bird in flight with loose brushstroke wings and ink splatter, on the upper arm near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ink splatter bird in flight on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bird with outstretched wings is shown in mid-flight, its feathers rendered with loose, bold black brushstrokes. Fine ink spatters and drips surround the wings and body, giving a painted, watercolour-like effect. The image is in black and grey, with the bird centred across the upper arm and shoulder against plain skin.

Upper arm Shoulder Bird Wing Feather Ink splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come down on the market for three days, and the ink-seller's crow was still wet. Tobias Marl had painted it on a board above his stall in the spring, a black bird with its wings thrown wide, and every sheet of paper he sold since had gone soft at the edges from the damp. People said the bird was too quick for a board. They said it would fly off when the weather broke.

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A girl came under the awning on the Saturday with a coat over her head and a bundle of wet letters. She asked him to write her brother's name on an envelope, because the post office would not take anything written in pencil. Marl dipped his brush. He wrote the name in one stroke, the way his father had taught him, and the ink flew off the nib in fine spatters across the paper, the way it always did when he was tired. She laughed at the mess. He said it was the bird's fault.

That night the rain stopped. In the morning the board was bare where the crow had been, and there were black drops on the cobbles all the way down to the river, as if something had shaken itself dry on the way. Marl followed them to the water. On the far bank a bird sat on a post, very still, and when he lifted his hand it opened its wings and went up, heavy and crooked, leaving a trail of small dark marks over the roofs.