Black lace-patterned bird in flight with a floral centre and multicoloured feather wings, tattooed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace-patterned bird in flight on an arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A bird in mid-flight with a long, thin leg extended downwards, drawn in black outline and filled with lace-like leaf, flower and scroll patterns. The wing feathers are shaded in pink, green and yellow, and the flower motif sits near the body. The tattoo runs diagonally across a smooth, lightly lit arm against a dark background.

Botanical Blackwork Upper arm Bird Lace Flower Feather Leaves Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pell had been working the same pillow for three days when the bird finally stopped being thread and started being a bird. Her knuckles had gone numb, the lamp had burnt down twice, and still the leaves kept spreading across its breast, scroll after scroll, until the whole creature looked cut from black paper and held up to a window. Its long thin leg trailed off the edge of the lace like a heron's, and she had not meant to put that there.

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She had meant to leave the wings bare. But the pink and green silks she had dyed for the Honiton fair kept slipping back into her fingers, and each time she reached for black, the feathers came out striped with colour instead, rising off the pillow like the first light over the Axe estuary. When she finally tied off the last pair of bobbins, the rose she had worked into the breast had opened its petals, and the bird shifted its weight from one leg to the other.

Her grandson Tom came in from the harbour wall with his cap full of mackerel and stopped dead in the doorway. The bird lifted clean off the pillow, shook the lace from its wings, and went out through the open window over the slate roofs, the long leg trailing behind it. 'Where's it going?' Tom asked. 'Wherever the wind will carry it,' Ada said, and was surprised to find she was not sorry.

That night the rent man knocked and got no answer, which was not unusual. In the morning Ada found a single feather of pink silk snagged on the latch, neat as a pen nib. She pulled it free, and it came away whole, still warm from the flight.