Small black and grey shaded wing tattoo on the inner wrist, with the hand raised and resting over dark leggings.

Small shaded wing on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small wing is tattooed on the inner wrist, with individual feathers shown in layered outlines and grey shading that fades toward the tip. The wing is in black and grey ink and sits against pale skin, with the hand raised in the frame. The background is a dark fabric surface, which keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Forearm Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hawk hit the windscreen just past the cattle grid, a soft thump Dara felt in her teeth before she saw anything at all. By the time she had the van on the gravel shoulder, the bird lay in the dust with one wing folded wrong beneath it, its chest rising and falling like a bellows left running.

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Nothing else moved for miles. The road ran straight to the horizon, heat lifting off the tarmac in sheets, and the only sound was the tick of the cooling engine. She knelt and slid her jacket under the bird, the way her grandad had taught her to handle a lamb, and it let her, which frightened her more than biting would have. Up close the feathers were banded in grey, dark where they joined the body and paling toward the tips until they were nearly the colour of the dust. One long primary had snapped clean.

Sable Flats was forty miles back the way she had come, and the rehabber there, Ruth Amesbury, ran a corrugated shed behind a shut petrol station with a bucket of mealworms and a voice like gravel in a tin. She set the wing with lolly-stick splints and tape, and said the break was clean and the hawk was young. It might fly again by autumn, if it wanted to.

Three months later Dara pulled up at the same cattle grid with the back doors open. The hawk stood on the rim of the crate, shifted its weight, and spread both wings wide enough to shade the road. It lifted without a sound. Halfway up it dropped a single feather, which turned over twice in the hot air and settled on the tarmac ahead of the van. Dara didn't stop for it. She left it lying where it fell.