Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Stylised bird of prey in flight
Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash
A bold stylised bird of prey with its wings spread wide in flight, shown in profile. The feathers are built from solid black shapes with white cut-out lines, dots and circular motifs running along the wing edges. The plain white background isolates the design, which reads as a stencil or flash sheet rather than a photograph of skin.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Dear Ray,
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The eagle came back from the cutter's this morning with the wings still tacky from the varnish, and Mr Pryce held it up to the window like a man checking a banknote. He says the circles along the feathers are the hardest part, because every one has to be cut with the same nerve as the last, or the whole thing looks like a sneeze. I told him you'd have laughed at that. You always said he cut a bird as if he was cross with it.
Sheet forty-one, he calls it, the one from the back of the drawer. He hasn't sold a copy since the spring fair, but a lad from the Co-op wanted it for his cousin's van, and Pryce agreed on condition nobody paints the centre ring yellow. That ring sits in the middle of the wing, the one that looks like a dropped button. He uses the same tin of black Dad kept for the shop sign, and he says it takes three coats before the white comes through clean.
I've kept the offcut. It's the tail, a fan of black teeth with four little rings along the edge, and I've pinned it above the bench where the wireless sits. When the weather turns I look at it and think of you out past the breakwater, watching the sky for that same shape over the water, a bird that never once had to ask anyone's leave to fly.
Write back soon. Tell me what they feed you out there.
Love, Joan
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