Two people stand side by side showing matching black and grey dotwork bird tattoos running from the upper arm to the forearm, with a chest tattoo visible on one of them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching bird tattoos on two arms

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two people stand close together, each showing a large bird with spread wings and long trailing tail feathers tattooed along the arm. The linework is bold and the feathers are filled with fine stippled dots, giving soft grey shading against pale skin. The composition is cropped to the arms and torsos on a plain pale grey background, with a small emblem-style tattoo visible on the chest of the figure on the left.

Dotwork Blackwork Upper arm Forearm Chest Bird Wing Feather Tail feather Emblem

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

Sit nearer the fire, the lot of you, and don't touch the kettle, because this is the tale of the birds that came down out of the pines above Thornwell, where the forest stops and the village starts and nobody sensible builds past the last stile.

Keep reading

Every spring, the story goes, a bird with wings wider than a hay cart came low over the mill roof. Its tail was not feathers so much as ribbon, long and curling, and it trailed through the millrace and caught on the sluice gates until the miller swore it was tying the water in knots. Two children watched it from the wall, Edwin Marr and his cousin Sefa, and they decided the bird was looking for a pair, because it always circled twice before it went back up the hill.

So they climbed the hill the autumn Edwin turned twelve. They found the bird roosting in a hollow where the ground smelled of cold iron, and it did not run. It lowered its head and let Sefa touch one wing, and the feather she pulled came away warm as new bread. Each of them carried one back down. That night the bird flew over both houses, and every feather in the village turned to smoke and drifted up toward the hill, and by morning the trailing tails had gone from the millrace altogether.

Edwin still keeps the one he took, though it is grey now and as brittle as a dry leaf. Sefa went up the hill the next spring and did not come down, and they buried nothing, because there was nothing to bury. Go on, look at the old pine on the ridge, and tell me you cannot see where the bark curls back on itself like a long tail feather. Then go to bed.