Black and grey drawing of a hoopoe in flight, with dense ornamental patterns across its wings, body and crest, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental hoopoe bird in black linework

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A hoopoe bird is shown in mid-flight, with its long curved beak, fanned crest and wings spread to one side. The body and wings are filled with fine hatched lines, scalloped feather rows and geometric patterns of dots, triangles and chevrons. The image is in black ink on white, with the tail sweeping down to the bottom right of the frame.

Blackwork Bird Feather Crest Beak Wing Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hoopoe had been sitting on the centre hub of the Waltzer since Tuesday, crest up like a bad hat, and Abe Calloway would not let anyone shoo it. 'It's counting us,' he said, and went back to his tea. I had the sign-writing that spring, which meant I was up a ladder with a fan brush between my teeth, repainting the name on the canopy: CALLOWAY AND SONS, ALL WEATHER, EST. 1921.

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I wanted to get the bird right. Every feather on that thing wanted a dot, a chevron, a little ladder of triangles, the way my nan stitched the edges of her tablecloths when she couldn't sleep. I worked on the wing while the generator coughed and the bird watched me from the hub with one black eye. Each time the lads fired up the lights it lifted its crest and fanned the whole front of its head open like a paper sun, then settled again. Abe said that was the signal. The fair always moved on when the crest went up.

On the last evening I painted the crest. I took my time, a fine line for every quill, and when I climbed down the bird was on the rail beside me, watching the wet paint. Then the generator caught and the lights flared across the field, and the hoopoe opened its crest and dropped off the hub in one long swoop over the Ghost Train, tail sweeping down toward the grass before it climbed away over the hedge.

By midnight the caravans were hitched and the lorries rolling for the A1. I stood on the empty field with my brush in my hand and looked up at the canopy. The painted bird was there in black and white, crest fanned, sharp as the day I finished it, and the real one was gone. Abe had been right, I thought. It had been counting us, and we had come up one short.