Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a soaring bird with fine line geometric circles and dotted arcs on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Soaring bird with geometric lines on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bird with outstretched wings, seen from above, is tattooed on the inner forearm. The feathers are built from stippled dots and fine shading in black and grey, and the body is shaded to give it depth. Thin fine line circles, arcs and dotted lines sit around the bird on a plain pale background.

Dotwork Fine line Geometric Forearm Bird Wing Feather Circle Arc Dotted line Geometric line

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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

Hendry Ross had hauled nets out of Porth Enna for thirty-one years, and in all that time the hawk had never missed a morning. It came up the valley before the lamps were lit, drifted over the slipway, and then began its rings above the bay, each one a little wider than the last, until the men could read the water from the shape of them.

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The rule was old and nobody wrote it down. Where the rings tightened and dropped, the shoal lay under them. Where they broke off and kept going, the boats stayed on the quay and the women mended. Morwenna Trewin kept the count on a slate by her door, and she was right more often than the harbourmaster, which he never forgave.

One October the hawk did not come. The rings stayed away for nine days, and the fleet went out blind, coming back with empty holds and cold hands. On the tenth morning Ash Ross, Hendry's son, rowed out past the Skerry alone, because his father's boat had lost a net there and he would not let the sea keep it. He found the hawk perched on the rocks with its wings spread flat to dry, the way gulls do after rain, and the net lying beneath it, torn but whole.

He untangled it while the bird watched him, then rowed home and told no one about the hawk, only about the net. The next morning the rings came back, tight over the bay. Ash said nothing, but he took the slate from Morwenna's door and drew a small hawk on the back of it, its wings opened wide, and nobody in the village has ever rubbed it out.