Black line drawing of a stylised bird in flight with decorative swirled feathers on the wings and tail, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised bird in flight line drawing

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A single bird is shown mid-flight in profile, facing right, with wings spread and a long tail trailing behind. The body and feathers are built from many fine, flowing outlines with spiral and swirl details, giving a patterned, ornamental effect. The drawing is entirely black linework on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Fine line Bird Flight Feather Swirl Wing Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird came to the pit head every morning that winter, sitting on the wheel frame above number two shaft while the cages dropped into the dark. Nobody in Carrow Row knew whose it was. Its feathers were drawn out in curls, like the ends of a blacksmith's scroll, and when it lifted off it trailed a tail so long it seemed to pull the cold air up behind it.

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Old Tobias Fenn said it was a witness. He claimed he had seen one before the water came into the Deep Seam in '79, and that the men who ignored it were the men who drowned. The others laughed at him, but they still watched it. In February a boy named Davy Ruddock, who was fifteen and kept his mother's hens, followed it up the slag heap because it kept turning its head back towards him.

On the top of the heap it dropped a single feather at his boots. Davy carried it down to the banksman, who turned it over in his fingers and went quiet. The feather was flying against the draught from the old workings, and Tobias, when they fetched him, said that meant the old roadway was breathing out. They sent a man down with a flame lamp before the next cage. He came back up fast, his face grey, and they cleared the shaft by noon.

Davy kept the feather in his cap band after that. On fine mornings the bird still came to the wheel frame, and the men still touched their caps to it, though none of them could have said why, except that it had been right once and nobody had forgotten.