Black fine line tattoo of a small group of birds on the forearm of a woman holding a film camera.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small birds tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman holds a silver film camera to her face, so her face is hidden, and she wears a white t-shirt with a black and red camera graphic. A cluster of small black birds in flight is tattooed on her outer forearm, near the wrist. The linework is fine and the tattoo is in black ink only, with a plain, softly lit street background.

Fine line Forearm Bird Camera

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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 gulls have started again on the boarding house roof, and you have promised Mrs Abernethy you will do something about them before the Whitsun guests arrive. Instead you take the Pentax off its hook behind the scullery door, wind the film on with your thumb, and walk down the shingle with the camera held at your chin the way your father taught you, elbows tucked in, breath held between frames.

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The sea is the colour of pewter. Above the groyne a flock lifts all at once, a dark scribble torn loose from the cliff, and you shoot three frames before you have decided what you are looking at. Your father used to say that birds never pose, and that the only honest photograph of a flock is the one you got by accident. He sold the business the year the chemist's on the front shut its darkroom, and left you the camera, a box of expired Tri-X, and the habit of counting frames.

By evening the roll is finished and you carry it up the hill to the lad with ink on his cuffs who promises prints by Friday. Mrs Abernethy is on the step with a tea towel when you come back, pointing at the roof. The gulls have gone.

On Friday the third frame shows the flock as a blur of wings over grey water, and in the top corner, small and sharp, one bird flying the other way, out past the groyne toward open sea, as if it had been the first to leave.