Black line drawing design of a stylised bird with spread wings rising from a curling stem with spirals and a leaf, shown on a white background with no body placement.

Stylised bird with spiral stem

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a stylised bird with wide, feathered wings spread above a slender body, set on a thin stem that ends in spiral curls and a pointed leaf. The linework is bold black strokes with tapered ends, and the wing feathers form a rounded, flower-like shape at the top. The design is shown in solid black on a plain white background with no skin visible.

Bird Wing Swirl Spiral Stem Leaf Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stems came in at half past two, wrapped in yesterday's sports pages, and by three I had the knife out and the bucket filled. Nobody else on the night crew wanted the chrysanthemums from the Hollins order. They had a way of looking out from the paper, heads bent as if they were listening for something on the street. I stripped the leaves, cut the ends on the diagonal, and reached for the last stem, which was lighter than it should have been.

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It was not a flower. It shifted under my thumb with a warmth in the petals, and then the bloom opened at the top like a pair of hands, and something grey-black with a crest folded itself up out of the head of it. It looked at me the way the foreman looks at a late clock-on. The stem I was supposed to bin was still rooted in my palm, sprouting curls at the base, neat as a fern in March.

I did not call anyone. Who would I ring at three in the morning in a wholesale unit off the ring road? I rolled up the shutter instead. The bird went through the gap into the orange glow over the car park, wheeled once above the bus station, then came back and settled on the drainpipe over my head, wings still half spread, one feather trailing like a loose cuff.

When the lorries came at six I found a single curl of stem on the concrete, tight as a watch spring, and I kept it in my apron pocket. The next night I left the last chrysanthemum on the bench uncut. By morning it was gone, and there was another curl on the floor, a little tighter than the first.