Fine line tattoo of a small bird on the inner wrist, placed beside a blue copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bird tattoo on wrist beside a book

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small bird with a rounded body, long tail and thin legs is drawn in single-weight dark ink on the inner wrist. The linework is simple and sketch-like, with no shading, and the ink reads as dark blue or black. A blue paperback of To Kill a Mockingbird sits beside the arm, and its cover has a similar red bird drawing.

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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

The bird came in on the third night of the cold snap, when the heating on Ward Nine gave up at midnight and nobody could find the key to the boiler cupboard. I found it on the sill outside Bay C, a scrap of a thing with its tail cocked like someone had pinned it there and forgotten the rest of it.

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Mr Teale in bed four couldn't sleep, so I'd taken to sitting with him between obs. He had been a signalman for forty years and knew every sound a railway could make. When the bird started up, it wasn't singing so much as taking inventory: the drip pump, the squeak of the trolley wheel by the sluice, the double beep of the sats monitor from Bay A. Mr Teale sat up and said, 'That's Doncaster calling the Hull train,' and it was. He laughed until he coughed.

After that I brought the bird crusts from the toast rack, and each night it had another sound to hand back. By the fourth night it had the sigh of the fire door, the call bell, and my own name, shouted down the corridor by Sister Okafor in the voice she keeps for emergencies and the vending machine. I stood at the nurses' station with the cold coming off the glass and heard myself called from the dark, from somewhere nobody else was standing.

On the last morning the sill was empty before the day shift came on. Mr Teale asked for it at breakfast. I told him it had gone to find a warmer ward. He nodded as though that was the sensible choice, then asked me to save him the crusts.

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