A small dark ornamental bird tattoo with patterned wings and body sits on the palm of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small patterned bird on a palm

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small bird in flight is inked on the centre of an open palm, facing left with its wings raised. The body and wings are filled with decorative scalloped and dotted patterns, with bold dark outlines. The ink is a single dark brown-black tone against light skin, and the plain pale background keeps the focus on the design.

Traditional Hand Bird Swallow Pattern

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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 lift in Harrowdene House has been broken since Tuesday, so you climb the eleven floors with a shoebox under your arm and a fledgling inside it. It is a grey, scruffy thing with one wing held wrong, and Mrs Okafor from flat 14 found it in the bin store that morning. The stairwell smells of bleach and somebody's Sunday curry. Each landing has a window with wire mesh across it, and through the mesh the estate spreads out: the car park, the football cage, the old laundry chimney that has stood there since before you were born.

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On the ninth floor the door to flat 9C is open an inch, and a radio is murmuring the shipping forecast to nobody. Your sister Dilly is at the kitchen table with a biro, drawing the same bird over and over on the back of a gas bill. She has scalloped the wings the way your nan used to crochet doilies, little rows of half-moons, dots packed into the gaps. She says the bird needs a name before you let it go. You tell her it needs a dry box, a bowl of water and a cat that is not hers.

On the balcony at dusk you open the lid and tip the bird into your cupped palm. It sits there, breathing too fast, and for a long minute it does nothing at all. Then a gust comes up off the car park, lifting the litter and the cage netting, and the bird rises unsteadily, turns left over the railings and climbs past the streetlamps. Its patterned wings catch the orange light, dark and scalloped like a shawl thrown over the estate.

"Well, that's a name then," Dilly says behind you. "Swallow."

You stand there with your hand still held open, the warmth fading from it, and the creases across your palm look like roads on a map of a town you have never once left.