Black and grey rooster tattoo with stippled shading on the forearm, with other tattoos of foliage and holly visible around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rooster tattoo on the forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A standing rooster in profile, with a tall comb, detailed feathers and a curved tail, fills the centre of the frame on the forearm. The bird is shaded in black and grey, with fine lines on the wing and dense stippling on the body. Faint green foliage, a holly sprig and the edge of a sunburst design appear around it against a dark background.

Traditional Dotwork Forearm Rooster Bird Foliage Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis had been given until Friday to get rid of the rooster, so at five in the morning he carried it up the stairwell in a laundry basket, because the lift on Hollins House had been broken since March. Seven flights, and the bird complained the whole way, a dry rattle under the lid like a man clearing his throat in church. On the roof the wind came straight off the reservoir and smelled of cut grass and diesel. He set the basket down by the water tank and lifted the lid.

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The rooster stepped out as if it owned the place, which in a way it did. It had come to Dennis as a chick from his late wife's cousin in Bethnal Green, and had grown into a bird with a comb like a torn flag and a tail that dragged behind it like wet rope. Nobody on the estate had minded the crowing until the council did, and then the complaints arrived in neat envelopes with the word nuisance typed in bold. Dennis had read them at the kitchen table with his reading glasses pushed up into his hair and said nothing to anybody.

The sun came up behind the cranes at the edge of the city. The rooster lifted its head, stretched its neck the way a clerk stretches before a long day, and crowed once, flat and furious, across forty balconies. A light came on in a window on the ninth floor. Then another. Somebody swore. Dennis waited for the doors to bang open below, for the shouting, but instead a woman leaned out of 9C in a dressing gown and called, "Is he all right?"

"He's fine," Dennis said. "He's just telling everyone it's morning."

She laughed, and then she was climbing the stairs herself, slippers slapping on the concrete, and by the time the sun cleared the cranes there were five of them on the roof, a flask going round, the bird strutting between their feet as if it had called them to a meeting. Friday came and went. The letters stopped. Nobody wrote to the council about that roof again.