Black ornamental winged bird tattoo spanning the upper back and onto the upper arms, in blackwork and dotwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate winged bird tattoo across a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large symmetrical bird with outstretched wings covers the upper back and extends onto both upper arms of a person with their arms raised. The bird is built from bold black outlines, dense dotwork and intricate tribal-style patterns, with a central star-like motif on the chest of the bird. The black ink is set against bare skin and a dark background, which keeps the design the focus of the composition.

Blackwork Dotwork Back Upper arm Shoulder Bird Wing Ornament Tribal pattern Star Feather

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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

You find the bird on the twelfth floor landing of Hollins House, the morning the lift stops for the third time that week. Someone has drawn it on the breeze block in marker, then gone over the lines with a compass point, so the dots pressed into the grey fan out from the bin chute door to the fire extinguisher. Its chest holds an eight-pointed star, and the points are sharp enough to nick your thumb if you touch them.

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Nobody on the estate admits to it. Mrs Okafor from flat 41 says it was there when she moved in, and Dean on the ground floor says it belongs to the council, the way the damp does. You spend your lunch breaks copying it into the back of an exercise book, counting the dots in each row of feathers, forty-two on the left wing and forty-two on the right, because you cannot stand a mismatch.

In November the rain gets into the stairwell and the lower feathers blur into the wall. You climb up every evening with a biro and a torch and trace what is left, feeling foolish, until Mrs Okafor catches you on the landing with the book open against the blocks. She doesn't ask. She takes the biro, adds a dot to the left wing where you miscounted, and goes back down one step at a time.

By spring the wall has been painted magnolia and the bird is gone. You still know it is symmetrical. You still count feathers in your sleep, forty-two and forty-two, and some nights the lift stops on the twelfth floor, and you stand very still in the dark until the doors open on something that is only a corridor.