Black and grey tattoo of a round-eyed bird beside a stem with heart-shaped leaves and a small bud, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Round-eyed bird and heart-leaf sprig on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised bird with large round eyes and scalloped feather detail sits at the lower left of the design, with a thin stem rising to the right. The stem carries heart-shaped leaves, a pair of smaller leaves and a tiny bud at the top. The linework is dark and even, with soft grey shading in the bird's wing and body, and the design is shown in black and grey against a plain skin tone and a brick wall behind.

Forearm Bird Heart Leaves Stem Bud

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

Mairi had counted the ferry crossings for nine winters, and the bird on the fence post at Ardcrail had watched every one of them. It was a round-eyed thing, its feathers laid in scales like the bottom of a fish-box, and it never once flew off when the boat came in. Her father said it was the same owl his own father had fed with scraps of herring, though owls don't live that long, and her father had never let facts get in the way of a good story.

Keep reading

The morning the letter came from the mainland, she carried it out to the post and sat on the cold stone wall. The bryony that grew between the stones had gone to seed, and one pale bud had opened at the top of the stem, no bigger than a thumbnail. She read the letter twice. The council would not repair the slipway before spring, the sale of the croft had gone through, and her brother was not coming home for the lambing after all.

The bird turned its head the full way round, the way they do, and considered her with those flat, patient discs. She told it what the letter said. It offered no opinion. Below the wall the tide was filling the gap in the rocks that had been dry all week, and the little boat her father had built sat where he had left it, its oars laid across the thwarts.

She went down to the water with the letter folded in her pocket, untied the boat, and rowed out past the skerry. She did not look back at the post, but she knew without looking that the bird was still there.