Fine line black ink tattoo of a small winged figure on the lower abdomen, with two hands resting on the skin.

Small winged figure on the abdomen

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small, simple figure with a rounded head and a wing-like shape is drawn in thin black ink on bare skin of the lower abdomen. The linework is loose and sketchy, with uneven outlines and no shading, and the tattoo is set against a soft, dimly lit background. Two hands rest on either side of the skin, and the only colour in the image comes from the dark tones of the clothing and background.

Fine line Other Winged figure Figure Wing Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Anwen Pryce kept the ledgers for the rope works at Mill Cove, and every January she drew the same small thing on the flyleaf before she wrote a single figure. It was a bundle with a round head and one wing folded down like a damp shawl, and the men who came to collect their wages thought it was a bird that had lost its way. Her son Idris asked her once what it was meant to be. She said it was a boy who hadn't decided yet.

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The winter the cannery shut, the wages stopped coming and the ledgers would not balance. Anwen sat up with a candle and a pot of ink that had thickened in the cold, and she drew the figure again, faster this time, letting the lines wander where her hand wanted them to go. By morning the wing had lifted a little off the page, or that was how it looked to Idris when he came down in his stockings and found the stove already lit and the kettle already complaining.

The rope works reopened in the spring. Nobody could say who had paid the arrears, only that the owner's clerk had come up the hill with an envelope and gone back down without his hat. Anwen never explained. She simply turned to the flyleaf, dipped her pen and added one more stroke to the wing, as if the boy had earned another feather.