Black and teal flash design of a stylised bird with swirling patterned linework, perched on a branch with circular accents.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Patterned bird perched on a branch

Mixed · Flash

A stylised bird faces right and perches on a single black branch with three circular rings beneath it. The body is filled with intricate black and teal swirls, curls and tapering lines, with white space showing through. The design is shown on a plain white background with no skin or body placement.

Bird Branch Swirl Circle Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada dusted the wooden bird on the mantelpiece every Friday, because her nan said the dust got into the swirls and dulled the green. It had been carved from a sycamore limb that came down in the gale above Hollin Row, and her great-grandfather had burned the patterns in with a heated nail, then rubbed copper dye from the chapel flashing into the grooves. Nobody in the row could remember him ever finishing a thing that wasn't useful, but the bird had been finished, and it faced the window the way a man faces a door he means to walk through.

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Her father came off the afternoon shift at Glyn with coal still grey in the lines of his knuckles and sat without speaking until the kettle sang. The roof had come in on the east face in March. Nobody was hurt, but the company men had stood about with clipboards and said the seam was finished, and Owen had gone quiet in a way Ada had learned to recognise. He looked at the bird for a long time that evening, then at the three iron rings bolted to the headstock outside, where the cage wheels turned.

On Friday she lifted the bird down to clean the base and found a folded slip of paper wedged under it, pencilled with tally marks in her grandfather's cramped hand. Three columns, one for each shaft, every shift he had worked counted in fives. Beneath them he had written, in capitals, GO WHERE THE LINES RUN.

She carried the bird out to the bus shelter on the main road, the one facing the coast. She set it on the bench with its beak pointing towards the sea, and when the early bus came she left the bird there for whoever was waiting.