Black and grey geometric bird with spread wings tattooed on the ribs, shown beneath a lifted grey t-shirt.

Stylised bird with spread wings on ribs

Geometric · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised bird with outstretched wings and a hooked beak is tattooed centrally on the lower ribs. The design is built from solid black shapes, arched segments, dangling dotted lines and a crescent beneath the body, with grey shading on the head and chest. The image is in black and grey and is framed by a grey t-shirt pulled up over the torso.

Geometric Blackwork Ribs Bird Eagle Wing Geometric shape Crescent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Halloran & Pike travelling show had lost its elephant to a dairy farmer in Lincolnshire and its strongman to a bigger tent in Leeds, so by the end of that wet autumn the only thing left worth paying for was the bird. Tobias Wren had carved her from a single block of oak for a barge that never got launched, and she had wings that folded down into the shutters of her cage and opened out again when the wires took her weight. The ringmaster, Silas Pike, called her Ada because a bird ought to have a plain name, and every night he hung her over the sawdust with a crescent moon of painted tin swinging from her feet.

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Nell, who mended the canvas, was the only one who still believed the crowds would come back. She climbed up the rigging one evening and asked Ada what she wanted. The bird said nothing, as birds do, but the dotted lines of carved rain along her wings gave a little shiver, and Nell took that for an answer and went down to tell the others that Ada wanted the sea.

So on the last night in October they let her fly. The wires were loosened, the shutters opened, and Ada lifted over the heads of six people and a dog, out through the flap of the big top and across the stubble fields toward the flat grey line of the coast. She came down on the church roof at Saltby and stayed there. Silas paid no one that week, and nobody asked him to.

The show folded by spring. Some say Ada still sits on that church roof in the wind, her crescent moon knocking against the slates. Children who go past at dusk count the drops of rain running off her wings, and call it the second show.