Black and grey realism tattoo of a magpie with spread wings on the side of a torso, with a faint outline of a hand holding a pocket watch chain below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Magpie in flight on a side torso

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A magpie is shown mid-flight with its wings spread upward and its head angled down, with a white belly and black plumage. The feathers are rendered with soft grey shading and fine dark strokes, and the bird's beak and eye are detailed. Below the bird, a faint outline of a hand holds a chain that leads to a partly visible pocket watch.

Realism Ribs Bird Wing Feather Pocket watch Chain Hand

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

You have been counting magpies since the gatehouse roof came down, and by now you have a tally scratched into the chapel lintel: seven for sorrow, one for a wedding that never happened. The eighth is the one that takes the watch. It drops off the broken curtain wall while you are eating your sandwich on the grass, and before you have finished the bite it is hopping along the rim of the old well with the chain swinging from its beak like a fishing line.

Keep reading

You follow it through the nettles, past the foot of the keep where the great clock hung before the fire of 1644 sent its face down into the moat. The watch is the one from the cellar, the one nobody claimed when the ruin was sold to the trust, its silver gone dull and its lid engraved with a name you have never managed to read. The bird stops on a stone, tilts its head, and regards you with one eye the colour of wet slate, as if it has been waiting for you to grow tired.

You do not chase it. You sit down on the warm stone and wait, the way your grandmother taught you to wait for pheasants. Half an hour passes. A cloud slides off the tower. Then the magpie lets the chain fall across your open palm, the watch still shut, and lifts away over the wall without a sound.

When you open the lid the hands are moving, and the time they show is the time you are sitting in, to the minute. You realise you are no longer certain which of you has been keeping the other.