A sheet of six black single-stroke line drawings of doves in flight on a white background, suitable as tattoo flash.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Six flying dove line designs

Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows six stylised doves or birds in flight, each drawn with smooth, tapered black strokes on a plain white background. The wings vary between sweeping, upturned and fanned poses, with some feather detail suggested by short curved lines. The drawings are solid black with no shading or colour, and they are arranged in a loose grid of two columns and three rows.

Dove Bird Flight Wing Feather Line art

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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 doves were kept in the loft above the Wesleyan chapel at Garth Dyke, eleven of them, and nobody in the village would eat their eggs. When the pit took a man, the chapel bell rang once for each shift still under the hill, and the keeper climbed the ladder with a basket of grey birds on his arm.

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The day the roof came down at the Number Four, Walter Pell sent his boy up the ladder for the last dove. The lad was called Emrys and he was nine, and he had not been allowed to go down, so he stood at the pithead with his hands in his pockets while the men clawed at the rubble with shovels and bare fingers. The bird sat in the basket for an hour. Then Walter lifted the lid, and it went up past the headframe in one stroke, over the slag heap, and out to the east where the air came from.

Nobody believed a bird would find anything under a hill. But the men had been listening for knocking and heard none, and they had been digging at the wrong seam. Emrys followed the dove's path on foot across the spoil, counting fence posts, until he came to a rusted grating in the bracken where a breath of cold air lifted his hair. The bird had dropped there and gone into the ground like a coin into a well.

They dug for three days. On the fourth, Walter climbed to the loft and found the doves crowded in their nests, and the empty basket hanging on its nail. The eleventh bird sat on the hook of his lamp beside the door, grey and quiet, its feathers smelling of wet earth. He never kept a dove again, and the men said he had been paid in full.