Black ink drawing of an ornate bird with patterned wings, small roses and swirling flourishes, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate bird with rose and flourish design

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a songbird with two patterned wings, one folded over the other. The body and wings are filled with repeating curved lines, and small roses sit on the head and wing, with a string of beads and scrolling flourishes beneath. The linework is bold and even on a plain pale background, with no colour.

Bird Rose Bead Flourish Swirl Songbird

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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

The snow shut the pass on the Tuesday, and by dusk there were eleven of us at the Ferrier's Rest with nothing to do but eat the mutton and argue about the fire. Mr Gilchrist had come up from the valley to sell buttons and was going nowhere. Two sisters from the convent at Ashby had their cart in the yard, its wheels frozen fast to the cobbles, and they sang the evening office so loudly the dogs joined in.

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It was Gilchrist's wife who had the bird. She kept it wrapped in a handkerchief in her basket, a songbird carved from pearwood, its wings folded one over the other, a rose pinned at its crown and a string of jet beads looped across its breast. Her grandmother had carved it, she said, for a bride who never reached the altar, and the bird was meant to be given away, not kept. Nobody believed her. We passed it hand to hand by candlelight, each of us turning it over to find the scrolls curling beneath its feet.

It sat on the mantel through the long white nights. On the third morning the bread ran out, and I found Gilchrist's wife at the window with the bird cupped in her palm, watching the drifts climb the gatepost. Not yet, she said, to nobody in particular. The road was cleared by noon. The sisters' wheels came loose with a crack, Gilchrist loaded his buttons, and the rooms emptied out into the sunlight.

When the thaw came I dusted the mantel and found the bird gone. In its place lay a single jet bead, polished dark by the fire, and beside it a folded note in her looping hand, for the one who kept the fire going. I put the bead in my apron pocket, and I still carry it, though I have never once decided what it was meant to buy.