Fine line black tattoo of an open heart with a curling tail beside a small bird shape on the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small heart and bird line tattoo on a hand

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small black line tattoo shows an outlined heart with a curling tail, next to a simple bird-like shape with a pointed beak. The linework is thin and even, with no shading or fill. The tattoo is shown in close-up against lightly reddened skin, with the rest of the hand softly out of focus.

Fine line Hand Heart Bird Swirl Line drawing

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

The gate has frozen to its post again, so you breathe on the hinge and work the latch with your thumb until it gives. The yard is ridged with mud gone hard as pottery. Beyond the cattle shed the wind comes straight off the moor with nothing to stop it but you, and you lean into it the way your father taught you, shoulder first, eyes on the ground.

Keep reading

The feed sack has split again. Someone has been at it in the night, and the crumbs run in a neat trail to the bottom step, where a small grey bird sits on the rail with its head to one side. It has a beak as sharp as a stitch of thread. You say, "Not you as well," and it does not move, only watches, as if you are the one who has wandered in uninvited.

Your daughter, Nell, pressed her nose to the kitchen window last week and drew a heart in the condensation, then a long curl of tail trailing off it like a kite string. She said it was the kite she had lost in the top field in October, and the heart was for it, because it had been brave. You told her kites do not feel anything. She told you that was exactly why it needed a heart.

You scatter the last handful of grain along the rail. The bird drops down, takes one crumb, and lifts off towards the top field where the kite still hangs, a pale smudge caught in the hedge. You stand in the cold with the empty scoop and find you are smiling, which, you think, is the first thing the morning has asked of you that you did not mind giving.