Small black fine line tattoo of a bird with a pointed beak and a curved tail, on the inner wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bird on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single bird is drawn in simple black linework, with a round eye, a long pointed beak, a curved tail and one thin leg. The lines are even and slightly tapered, and the bird sits on pale skin with no shading or fill. The composition is centred on the wrist, with a green garment at the left edge and denim at the right.

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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

Sit down, you, and mind the wet step. Not that one, the one that rocks. Right. Listen now, because I'll not tell it twice, and the bridge lamps are already buzzing, which means the bird is about.

Keep reading

Back when the gasworks still breathed over the canal, a clockmaker called Ada Pell kept her shop above the lock at Ancoats. Every night at eleven she wound forty clocks, and every night one of them ran a minute slow. Nobody could find the fault, though half the street tried.

One February a small grey bird with a beak like a bradawl came in through the broken fanlight and perched on her bench. It kept one leg tucked and watched her hands the whole time she worked. She let it stay. When she finally looked up it had gone, and in its place lay the brass escapement from the slow clock, picked clean as a bone. Ada ran out onto the towpath after it. The bird sat on the rail of the lock gate, tail curled, staring at the black water as if the moon owed it money.

She never caught it. But the clocks ran true from that night, and on the anniversary of the theft a single feather turned up caught in the lock gate, dry as paper, with a tiny brass tooth tangled in its barbs. I keep the feather. The tooth went back in the clock. That's the whole of it, and the lamps are going out, so off you go before the bird comes back for your watch.

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