Black tribal-style design of a bird with outstretched wings, filled with white scrollwork and swirls on a plain white background.

Spread-wing bird with scrollwork

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical bird with wings fully spread, shown as a solid black silhouette. White scrolling linework and spirals run through the wings and body, and the tail tapers to a point. The design is in black ink only, set against a plain white background with no body part visible.

Blackwork Bird Wing Scrollwork Swirl Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, that's the third board from the door and it always was. Sit where you can see the stove, because the wind comes off the Wash tonight and it will want in. Now, you asked about Tamsin Greaves and the gull, and I'll tell it straight, though my father told it crooked and his father before him told it with the names wrong.

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The Bramble Rose was out past the Dogger when the fog came down thick as wet wool. Tamsin was at the wheel and the lad, Owen Pell, was on the nets. He swore after that a bird came out of the murk and landed on the gunwale, big as a heron, black as a boot, its wings spread wide enough to cover the boat's whole beam. Its feathers were cut through with pale curls, like someone had scratched scrollwork into the night with a nail. Owen said the spirals turned slow, the way the tide turns in the mouth of the river, and every turn he felt the boat come true again on her heading.

Tamsin never once looked at it. She said the bird had a way of settling a crew, and that was all she needed. They ran for home by the bearing it gave them, feeling for the Haisbro bell until it rang clear through the murk. When the fog lifted at the mouth of the harbour the bird was gone, and there was only a single long black feather lying in the scupper, pointed like a spear at the land.

Tamsin kept that feather in the wheelhouse for thirty years. Nobody touched it. When she died they found it still there, and beside it, nailed to the beam, a little hand-scratched spiral of tin with the same curls cut into it. Mind your footing going out. The wind's rising, and I can hear the bell.