Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental rooster design

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a rooster in profile, with its tail feathers curving up and to the left. The body and tail are filled with spirals, scrolls and small dots in white, creating a decorative, patterned effect. The design is centred on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Rooster Bird Swirl Dot Scrollwork Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ice had got into the rooster's tail again, and Nell had to stand on the top rung of the ladder to reach it. Below her the yard was a white pool, and her uncle Tobias stood in it with his hands cupped round his mouth, shouting that the Garrow carrier was already late and the road would close by four. She wedged her boot against the gutter and worked the chisel into the seam where the spindle met the iron.

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Her grandfather had painted the bird the summer before the war, lying along the ridge with a brush no thicker than a hair, picking out every curl of the tail and every dot down the breast. Nobody else had been allowed to touch it since. The black had gone grey at the edges with weather, but the white spirals still showed clear against the snow, as if the bird had been drawn over a slate in chalk.

The chisel went through with a crack. The cockerel shuddered, groaned on its spindle, and swung round until its tail faced the wind and its beak pointed straight down the valley, where a single lantern was crawling up the white road. Nell held the ladder and watched the light settle on the bird's breast, the scrolls and dots catching it one by one, until the carrier's sledge turned in at the gate.

Tobias was already at the kitchen door with the big lamp in his hand. When she came down, frozen to the wrists, he only nodded at the window and said the bird had never once pointed the wrong way in his life, which was a story he had told every winter since she was small.