Fine line ink drawing of a sparrow in flight with spread wings and tail feathers, shown as a tattoo design on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sparrow in flight, ink drawing

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A sparrow is shown mid-flight, with one wing raised and the other spread wide, and its tail feathers fanned out below. The bird is drawn in dark navy ink using fine hatching and stippled detail for the feathers, head and breast. The plain cream background leaves the single monochrome figure as the only focus.

Fine line Bird Wing Feather Flight

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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

Don't stand there gawping at the rhubarb, girl, the bird's coming back round the wall. Watch the wing. See how it's thrown up high while the other one lies out flat as a bed sheet on the line? That's how they hold themselves in the air. Your gran taught me that, and she had it from a woman who kept bees at the bottom of Ferrier Lane.

Keep reading

The story goes that a sparrow lived in the hedge behind Mrs Achterberg's greenhouse, a brown little thing with a black bib and no manners at all. Every morning it robbed the seed tray she'd put out for the blackbird, and the blackbird complained loudly enough to wake the street. Mrs Achterberg never did. She'd counted the feathers on that sparrow's tail and knew each one by name. Eleven, she said, and one of them bent from a window in March.

One wet spring the sparrow stopped coming. The hedge went quiet. Mrs Achterberg went out with her trowel and dug up the lettuces to see if it had gone to ground, and under the third row she found a brass button, a pear stone, and a ring of wire the sparrow had been using for a nest. She hung the wire on her gate and went indoors, and the kettle boiled dry twice before she came out again.

Then one June evening the sparrow came back over the roof, wings thrown out, tail fanned like a hand of cards, and dropped straight into that wire ring as if it had never been away. Mrs Achterberg said nothing. She filled the seed tray. The blackbird, I'm sorry to say, got none of it.