Black ink drawing of a bird with spread wings, filled with mandala and zentangle-style patterns, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Patterned bird in flight

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised bird with outstretched wings is shown in flight against a plain white background. Its body and wings are filled with dense, repeated patterns including circular mandala motifs, dotted rings, scalloped shapes and fine hatching. The drawing is done in solid black ink with clean outlines and no colour.

Bird Mandala Wing Pattern

Find an artist for this

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 gulls at Porthkennack knew the boats before we did. Every morning my father's Mary Ellen came round the harbour wall on the flood, and the birds went up off the slipway like someone had shaken out a sheet. I watched them from the net loft, where I sat with a needle and a hank of tarred twine, learning the knots my mother had stopped having the patience to teach.

Keep reading

The skipper's wife, Hester Lowry, kept a drawing in the tally box, done in biro on the back of a chandler's invoice: a bird with its wings thrown wide, filled with rings and scallops, every feather a different sum of little marks. She said it was a gull she had seen once off the Lizard, flying the wrong way into a squall, and that you could read the whole sea from its pattern if you were patient enough. I was not patient. I was eleven and wanted the bird to be a sign.

The winter the Mary Ellen didn't come round the wall, I took the box down to the slip and sat with it until the light went. The gulls were still there, screaming over an empty mooring. I copied the largest ring onto the back of my hand in ink from the pen in my pocket, then counted the dots around it the way Hester had taught me, one for each knot in a fathom of net, until the numbers matched the tide times pinned up at the chandlery.

Three days later Hester found me there and did not ask what I was doing. She looked at my hand, then at the water, and said the boat was lying off Mousehole with a fouled prop and a sulking engineer, and would be in on the evening flood. I went back to the loft and tied the knot I had been practising all winter, a sheet bend that holds under load and lets go when you ask it to. The gulls came in over the wall that night, still counting.