Small black fine line tattoo of a bird in flight on the ankle, shown against pale skin.

Small bird in flight on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A single small bird in flight is drawn in black ink with tapering, calligraphic strokes for the wings, head and tail. The linework is thin and the bird has no shading, so it reads as a simple silhouette. The tattoo sits alone in the centre of the frame against plain skin, with a dark wooden surface at the left edge.

Fine line Ankle Bird Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook of the Marigold kept his ship's biscuits in a tin whose lid had never fitted, and so the small bird that came aboard off the Dogger Bank found the tin open before anyone else did. It landed on the rim of the galley hatch in the grey of the middle watch, shook the wet from its wings, and looked at him as if he owed it wages.

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Mr Halloran, the mate, wanted it put over the side. A bird on a ship that had no reason to be out there was bad luck, he said. But Tomas Greave had grown up in a house where a bird at the window meant somebody was coming home, and he left the crumbs where they were. By the second bell the bird was sitting on the lamp bracket, tail flicking, watching the fog press against the glass.

The fog came down thick at four, so thick the bow vanished from the wheelhouse. The compass swung and the lead line gave a depth that made no sense for the Skerry Mouth. Halloran was ready to drop anchor and wait for daylight. Then the bird lifted off the lamp, went out through the open hatch, and was gone. Tomas went up on deck in his stockinged feet and saw a thin dark stroke of a shape moving ahead of the bow, turning, doubling back, waiting whenever the ship fell behind. He called the wheel to follow it. Nobody argued. At first light the Skerry light stood up out of the water exactly where the bird had been.

At the quay Tomas found the biscuit tin empty and a single black feather on the galley table, curved like a question mark. He never did tell the owners why the Marigold came home a day early. He pinned the feather above the stove, and every morning after that he crumbled a heel of bread onto the sill, just in case.