Black and grey sketch-style bird tattoo on a forearm with ink splatter blotches on both forearms near the elbows.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sketched bird and ink splatter on both forearms

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A person in a white t-shirt holds their forearms together, showing a loose, sketchy bird with feathered wings and trailing lines on one forearm. Both forearms carry solid black ink splatters around the elbow area, with fine drips and specks spreading down toward the wrists. The image uses only black ink and grey skin tones, and the composition is a close crop of the arms against a plain light background.

Blackwork Forearm Bird Wing Feather Ink splatter Sketch Splatter

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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

Mabel Tull kept her ink jars under the eaves of the fish hall, where the rain could not reach them, and she sold them by the thimble to anyone who came with an empty pot and a sorrowful story. The market was thin that wet spring. Carts stood steaming along Cordwainer Lane and the gutters ran brown with cabbage leaves.

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On the third Thursday a bird came down out of the grey and perched on the rim of her big stone jar. It was a bird drawn in a hurry, Mabel thought, its wings only lines, the feathers half-finished and trailing off like smoke. It did not shake itself dry. It looked at her with an eye like a pricked full stop and said nothing, which she counted in its favour, for most customers talked.

Then it dipped one wing, the way a clerk dips a pen, and drew the wing slowly through the ink. Black drops flew from the feathers and struck the cobbles in a ring. Where they landed the stones turned to pools as dark as coal, and the wet market fell quiet. The bird lifted, shook out its unfinished wings, and each drop rose up again and clung to the stall posts, the eaves, and the shoulders of the men who had stopped to stare.

Mabel never sold ink on credit again. Whenever it rains in Cordwainer Lane, she said, you can still see the bird's wing printed in black on the wet stones, and a little way off, if you look, the bird itself, finishing its feathers one slow stroke at a time.