Black silhouette design of four perched birds on a bare branch, with a songbird on a leafy twig and three small birds in flight above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Silhouette birds on branches stencil

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a black silhouette design of birds: four birds perched on a lower branch, a songbird on a leafy twig in the middle, and a larger bird and two smaller birds flying in the upper area. The shapes are solid black with no internal linework, shading or detail, and they are arranged across the sheet with plenty of white space around them. The design looks like a stencil or flash sheet and has no colour apart from black.

Bird Silhouette Branch Leaves Flying bird Songbird Stencil

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 card was the wrong weight, and Hester Lunn said so twice before she would cut a single line. Her knife went round the edge of each bird slowly, the way her mother had taught her, and the shavings curled onto the back step where the cat liked to sit. Beyond the stile the forest began, all oak and bramble, and at dusk four sparrows lined up on the holly bough there as if they had been paid to do it.

Keep reading

She had been watching them since the spring, when the mill closed and half the lane emptied out after the families who had money for the train. The birds stayed. She cut them the way they sat, one fat-bellied and turned away, one with its head tipped toward the next, the last with its tail feathers splayed against the cold. Her nephew Tobias came up from the town that winter with a bag of wages he would not spend and asked whether she could make him something to hang in the window of his lodgings. She cut three more birds for the sky above the branch, small ones, one of them mid-dip, and he thought they were the best thing he had ever seen.

The hard frost came in January and the holly bough was bare by Candlemas. Hester walked out with her stencil in her coat pocket and stood where the birds had been. There was nothing on the branch but the frost in its grooves. She pinned the sheet to the church noticeboard that Sunday with the four sparrows in black and the white paper showing all around them, and the vicar stopped to look at it for a long while. Nobody in the village could say what it was meant to be, only that the empty space looked like it was waiting for something to land.