Black and grey dotwork ornament with a dotted band and a larger faint bird design on bare thighs, with a hand with nails in the foreground.

Ornamental and bird tattoos on thighs

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The left thigh shows a black and grey ornament made of fine dots and thin lines, with a vertical circular motif above a band of concentric dotted arcs. The right thigh has a larger, lighter tattoo that appears to include a feathered or bird-like shape, though much of it is faded or cut off by the frame. The photograph is warm and soft-focused, with a hand and manicured nails resting in the foreground.

Dotwork Geometric Thigh Ornament Mandala Circle Bird Dot Arc Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had turned before Aunt Mags finished her tea, and that was the first thing she said to me that morning, as if it were my fault. We were on the slip at Sallow Quay with the boat half in the water and the mud shining grey beyond the harbour wall. She wanted the mooring chain counted before we left, every link, because she had once lost a dinghy to a rusted shackle and never forgave the sea for it.

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A curlew came down on the flats while I worked the chain, its long bill sweeping the sand for lugworm. Each hole it made filled with water and rang out in a small circle, and the circles spread into one another until the whole bay looked pricked with dots. Mags called it the bird's bookkeeping. She said the curlew was the only creature in Sallow Quay who never owed anyone money.

I counted forty-one links and wrote the number on the back of a tide chart in pencil. When I looked up, the bird had lifted, and the rings were fading outward one inside the next until there was nothing left of them. Mags had gone quiet at the tiller. She was turning her brass thumb ring round and round, then she slid it onto my finger without a word and pushed the boat off.

Forty-one links, one ring, and a tide that would be back by four. I still have the chart. The pencilled figure has smudged, but I can make out the small circle I drew beside it, and around that a row of dots, the way the bird had left them.