Black fine line tattoo of a small bird with a shaded wing, placed on the inner wrist, in a black and white photograph.

Small bird on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, simple bird is drawn in black outline, facing right with a thin tail and two thin legs. The wing and body have a few hatched lines and areas of solid black shading, with clean, even linework. The tattoo sits centrally on the inner wrist against a plain, softly lit background, and the photograph is in black and white.

Fine line Forearm Bird

Find an artist for this

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

Brother Osric had been told twice that the sparrow was not to come into the scriptorium, and twice he had found it on the sill the next morning, fluffing its feathers against the cold glass as if it had been invited. The prior called it a nuisance. The cellarer called it a thief, because it had once carried off a crust from his desk and eaten it on the lectern. Osric, who had ruled lines on calfskin for eleven years and never been allowed to draw anything not already in a psalter, said nothing and kept crumbs in his sleeve.

Keep reading

The commission was a Book of Hours for a widow in Lincoln who wanted her late husband's favourite things in the borders. She had sent a list: a hound, a barley sheaf, a hawk, a ship with three masts. Osric drew them in careful lead point, and each one looked stiff and borrowed, as if copied from someone else's work. He could not get the hawk to stop looking embarrassed.

On the feast of Saint Brendan, the bird flew in through the open shutter while the bell rang for terce and landed beside his inkhorn. It turned its head, one eye and then the other, and hopped twice toward the lamp. Osric dipped his pen and, for once, did not think about the rule. He drew it quickly: the thin tail, the two stick legs, the wing hatched with three short strokes. When he looked up the sparrow was gone, and the prior stood in the doorway, breathing hard from the stairs.

The prior studied the page for a long time. Then he said quietly that the widow had not asked for a sparrow, and that the rule said nothing about sparrows in the margins of books. He took the crumbs out of Osric's sleeve himself and left the page as it was.