Black linework design of a bird of prey with spread wings over blue watercolour splashes, with the word Ravenclaw in script beneath it.

Spread-wing bird design with Ravenclaw script

Fine line · Mixed · Flash

A detailed black linework drawing of a bird of prey with wings fully spread, shown from the front with feathers rendered in fine hatched strokes. Soft blue watercolour splashes sit behind the bird and a stylised script reading Ravenclaw appears below it on a textured off-white background. The composition is centred and symmetrical, with the bird filling most of the upper half of the frame.

Fine line Bird Eagle Wing Feather Script Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird came down onto the customs shed roof the morning the ink ran out, which was the first thing Mrs Hallett said when she saw the spread of it across the slates. "Keep it away from the ledgers," she said, and I did, though it had no interest in paper. It wanted the tin of blue ink on the windowsill, and it watched me with one amber eye while I filled my pen from the bottle.

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The quay had its own theories. Some said the eagle had come up the estuary from the marshes after the storm took the old dovecote roof. Others said it had been a fisherman's bird once and remembered the nets. Nobody agreed about anything except the price of coal and the fact that the bird never flew out over the water. It stood on the bollard and opened its wings in the wind until the feathers lifted like the pages of a book somebody had dropped, and the rain-grey sky behind it looked as if someone had spilt a jar of colour across it.

On the last Friday of the month I finally understood. The bird rose over the harbour wall and came back with a strand of faded ribbon in its talons, the sort the fishwives used to bind their nets, bleached to the colour of the shallows. It dropped the ribbon at my feet and waited. I knotted it round the ink tin, and the eagle lifted it away over the mudflats until both were lost in the glare.

Mrs Hallett found the ledger open the next morning at a blank page, a single blue feather pressed flat in the gutter. She had the sense not to ask what I had written there, and the windowsill has been bare ever since.