Black and grey tattoo of a bird of prey with spread wings above a geometric circle and hanging lines, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Spread-wing bird over geometric circle on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bird of prey with outstretched wings sits at the top of the design, with feathers rendered in fine stippled dots and shading. Below it, a thin-lined circle, crossing geometric lines and a row of hanging dots and a pointed pendant form a symmetrical, pendant-like composition. The work is entirely black and grey, with soft tonal shading on the bird and crisp single-line work on the geometry, set against plain skin.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Bird Eagle Circle Line Dot Pendant Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The well at Sallow Crossing had been dry since the spring the river changed its mind, and so the people who kept the road gave the hawk the job of looking for water. Every morning before the heat came up off the flats, the hawk rose from the fence post by the tollhouse and turned slow circles over the salt pans, its wings spread so wide the shadow of them crossed three farms at once. Nobody asked it to. It simply did it, the way a man keeps a promise he made in his sleep.

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One morning a girl called Ines walked out from the caravans with a tin cup and a length of string, and she sat down in the road to wait. The hawk saw her there and dropped lower than it ever had. It circled her once, twice, then flew off northward over the ridge, and she followed it with her eyes until it was a fleck above the cactus line. She didn't follow it on foot. She knew better than that. She went back for the rope.

It was past noon when the hawk came back, and it had something in its talons that caught the light like a fishhook, a little iron weight on a cord. Ines tied her string to it the way her grandmother had shown her, and when she let the weight fall down the old shaft under the tollhouse, it went down and down until she heard a knock, a small clean knock, far below. The hawk folded its wings and landed on the lip of the well, and it watched her haul the bucket up.

The water came up cold and tasting of stone. Ines poured the first cup onto the dust for the bird, the way you do for someone who has earned a thing without asking for it, and the hawk drank from the wet ground until the dust turned dark.