Black ink line drawing of a stylised bird with curling feathers, swirling patterns and large flowers, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised bird with flowers and swirls

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a stylised bird with a curled head, sweeping wing feathers and a long, tapering tail. The bird is surrounded by large flowers and spiralling scroll motifs. The linework is dense and uniform in black on white, with small dots and hatched lines filling the feathers and petals, and the design is centred on the page.

Bird Flower Swirl Feather Scroll Paisley

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dearest Hettie,

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The pass closed on Tuesday and the road has been under snow since, so I am writing this by the kitchen range at the Fox and Tallow, where the stew never runs out and the guests have run out of conversation. You will laugh, but the only thing keeping the coachmen civil is a bird. Old Mr Paddick, who has not left the settle in three days, has been drawing on the back of the inn ledgers with a steel nib and a bottle of ink he won from a Dutch cartographer at cards. His bird has a curled head like a question mark, wings fanned out in feathers as stiff as church fans, and a tail that spirals down into flowers the size of cabbages.

Every evening he adds a little more. Yesterday he filled the petals with dots, and the girl who scrubs the tankards asked whether it would fly off the page if he finished it. He said it would only fly if somebody believed the tail was long enough to hold it up. Then he tore the sheet from the ledger and pinned it above the bar, and the room went quiet in the way a room does when it has agreed on something without speaking.

This morning the sun came out over the ridge, blinding on the drifts, and the carter found his horses had got through the night. Paddick was not at the settle. The ink bottle sat empty beside the fire, and on the ledger page he had added one last line of hatching along the tail, very fine, that curled off the edge and kept going into the margin where nobody could follow it. I have pinned the drawing up where he left it. Come in spring, and we shall see where the tail goes.

Yours in the cold, Margaret