Black outline drawing of a bird in flight on a white background, a simple design that could be used as a tattoo stencil.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Outline of a bird in flight

Black and grey · Flash

A single bold black outline of a bird with its wings raised and its body angled to the right, drawn on a plain white background. The linework is continuous and uniform with no shading or fill inside the shape. The image is centred with generous white space around the bird and uses only black ink.

Bird Flying bird Outline Dove Swallow

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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

Mind the third step, it's gone soft with the damp, and sit where you can see the lamp, for a story like this wants a light to lean on. Dorothy Pell kept this light for thirty-one years, and she never once let the glass go dirty, not even the winter the sea came over the gallery rail and filled the lantern room with weed.

Keep reading

The bird came in during the October gale, a swallow or a dove, nobody agreed on which. It was so spent its wings had gone flat as slate, and it hit the glass like a thrown stone and dropped onto the grating. Dorothy carried it down in her apron. Its wings were held out to either side, raised, the way they only stay when a creature has stopped trying to fold them. She set it by the stove, and it sat there with its head turned toward the lamp, as if the light were the only thing it had flown for.

By morning the wind had dropped and the sky was rinsed clean. She opened the door, and the bird did not go straight away. It sat on the step, then lifted, banked once over the rocks, and lined itself up with the beam. It went out low over the water toward the mainland, body tipped into a wind nobody else could feel. Dorothy always said the sea was the colour of pewter and the bird was the only thing on it that knew where it was going.

Her successor, a sour young man from Penzance, found the logbook in a biscuit tin years later and asked why the margins were full of tiny pencilled birds. Dorothy had been dead a decade by then, so he simply counted them, and wrote the total at the bottom of the last page.