Black and grey photo of a single-line outline of a small bird tattoo on the inside of a forearm, in fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Simple bird outline on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small bird in profile is drawn as a single continuous black outline, with a rounded head, a pointed beak, a short tail and two thin legs. The linework is even and clean, and the inked area is left unshaded, so the bird shows only as the skin tone inside the outline. The photograph is greyscale and centred on the forearm, with the background softly out of focus.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorry had been idling since six, and by half past nine the queue ran back past the petrol station at Greywater Bridge. I was on the second booth with a stamp in one hand and a biro in the other when the boy in the blue anorak came up to the glass alone. No adult, no bag, just a sheet of cartridge paper that he pushed under the gap with two fingers, the way you'd slide a note under a classroom door.

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It was a bird. One line, drawn without lifting the pen, a round head, a beak that pointed up at the sky like it had just noticed something, a short tail and two thin legs. Nothing inside it. The paper showed through the bird like a window. 'Is this your passport?' I asked. He shook his head and said his sister had drawn it so the bird could come across too, and that she'd told him birds don't need visas, only a good reason. I said I'd have to see the reason. He pointed at the outline and said it was the reason, it had to be empty so there was room in it.

I should have sent him back to the car park. Instead I stamped the corner of the paper with the date, then, because the queue was shouting and nobody was looking, I stamped a small wing on the bird too. He folded it into his anorak pocket, said thank you the way children say it when they're being polite to strangers, and walked out past the barrier into the grey light. I kept the sheet of paper pinned above the kettle for years. The bird never once needed filling in.

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