Gold-toned tattoo of a mockingjay with an arrow, set inside a ring on a forearm, with partial cursive script at the top edge.

Mockingjay and arrow inside a ring

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a bird in flight, its wings spread, with an arrow passing diagonally beneath it, all enclosed in a thin circular outline. The bird and arrow are shaded with soft gradients of yellow, ochre and brown, while the ring is a solid gold tone. The tattoo sits near the centre of the frame, with cursive script partly visible at the top edge.

Forearm Bird Arrow Ring Script

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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

No, sit nearer the fire, the wind off Skerrin takes the words if you let it. Aye, that lamp was Tamsin's grandmother's, and she'd have skinned me for leaving it on the sill. Now listen, because the bird is the whole of the matter. You'll have seen the mimics on the causeway posts, grey things that steal the shepherd's whistle and hand it back a half-note flat. My grandfather said the first one came over in a fishing creel from the south, and nobody on the island trusted a thing that could sound like everybody.

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Dara Quill caught the one I'm telling you about in the autumn, when the herring were thin. He kept it in a wicker cage in the old boathouse and taught it everything it heard. By November it could do the gulls, the bell at St Brendan's, the ferryman's cough, and the cry the mainland recruiters used when they rowed in for the names. That last one it learned in a single afternoon, and Dara went white and said nothing about it to anyone.

The day the boats came for the names, the whole island stood on the strand with their coats buttoned to the throat. Dara walked down with the cage under one arm and a single arrow fletched in gull feathers in his other hand. He did not look at the officers. He opened the wicker door, laid the arrow along the rim, and let the bird go up through the spray. It flew once round the bay in a tight gold ring, wings wide against the low sun, and then it sang the recruiters' cry back at them, every note, until the crew of the first boat turned their oars and rowed home without a single name.

The bird settled on the boathouse roof that evening and never came down. On still nights you can still hear it up there, calling in the recruiters' voice, and the boats stay tied in the harbour.