Black tribal-style design of a stylised bird in flight with swirling tail feathers, shown as a flat drawing with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised bird in tribal swirls

Black and grey · Flash

A flat black drawing of a stylised bird flying to the left, with a curled head and beak and sweeping swirl-tipped feathers. The bold, tapering linework uses solid black shapes on a white background with no shading. The composition is a single diagonal motion, with long tail plumes curling up to the right.

Bird Swirl Feather Tail Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the fire has given up for the night, so you will have to lean in like a novice at confession. Brother Anselm kept the swifts in the bell tower, every one a grey scrap with a name chalked on its leg. The one I mean was called Mab, though nobody could say who had named her, and she was the only bird that ever came down to eat from the scriptorium sill.

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One February the abbot sent Anselm to the fen to fetch oak galls for the new psalter, and he carried Mab in a basket because she would not stay behind. The fen was black water and sedge that night. Halfway along the causeway the wind swung round from the east, and Mab stood up in the basket and would not sit down again. She went off into the reeds with her head low and her wings laid back, the way a bird flies when it is hunting rather than fleeing.

Anselm came home with his galls and no bird. For a month the brothers heard nothing but the bell at matins, which rang itself twice at dawn in a wind that was not there. On the third Sunday a boy from the village brought up a rolled sheet of vellum that no one had written on. Along its margin ran the curled marks of feather tips, sweeping up and out to the right, as though a bird had lifted from the page itself.

Anselm laid the sheet on the sill and said nothing for a long while. Then he dipped his pen and drew the rest, the small head and the long plumes, and beneath the curls he wrote a single word: home. Take your cup, go on. That is the whole of it, and the bell still rings twice when the wind comes off the fen.