Black fine line tattoo of a small bird with a curling tail, placed on the skin behind a person's ear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bird tattoo behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline of a bird in flight, with its wings raised and a curling, swirled tail, is tattooed on the skin behind the ear. The linework is thin and even in solid black ink, with no shading or fill. The image is black and white, and the ear and hair frame the tattoo against a soft-focus background.

Fine line Neck Bird Swirl Outline

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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

Dear Tom, the masons came up the hill on Tuesday with a cart and a boy who would not stop whistling, and I told them the north tower was not for mending. They think I am being sentimental. Perhaps I am. The swifts came back on the ninth, three days before the rain, and they have taken over the gap where the roof used to be, screaming past the arrow slits as if the place still had a use.

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I have been sitting on the wall at dusk watching them. Mr Pell from the village says a swift never lands once it has left the nest, that it eats and sleeps on the wing for two years. I did not believe him until I saw one drop down to the chapel floor for a scrap of straw and climb straight back out again, its forked tail curling behind it like a loose ribbon. Grandmother used to draw them on the backs of the rent books, the same lifted wing every time, and she always finished the tail with a little flourish, as though the bird had somewhere more important to be.

The boy with the whistle found a carving on the chapel lintel this morning, under the moss. It is a bird no bigger than my thumb, outlined with a chisel and never filled in. Someone wanted it to fly out of the stone. I pressed my finger along the line and it is worn smooth, not by weather but by hands, the way a step goes hollow where everyone steps.

I am not selling the keep, whatever the solicitor says. Come in June, when the swifts are loudest, and bring the fine pens from the drawer in your study. We will make a proper copy of the lintel before the masons get at it, and you can tell me whether that bird is really flying or only pretending.