Black ink design drawing of a stylised bird with patterned wings and a long tail that curls into spirals, shown on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised bird with swirling tail

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a stylised bird in flight, with its head turned to the right and a long beak extended. The wings are filled with solid black sections and white cut-out patterns, while the tail breaks into flowing curls that taper downwards. The image is monochrome and centred on a plain white background with no body part visible.

Bird Wing Swirl Tail Scroll

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You almost don't recognise the hall. The parquet is the same, and so is the smell of floor polish and cold radiators, but someone has strung paper chains from the basketball hoops and hung a banner reading Class of Ninety-Nine in wobbly capitals. Mr Ashdown, who taught you chemistry and never once smiled, is squinting at the name badges through the wrong pair of glasses. You find your own sticker by the door, peel it off, and stick it to your coat before you can change your mind.

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Maren is by the squash table, exactly where she always stood, one hand around a plastic cup. In Year Nine she drew birds in the back of every exercise book you owned. Not robins or pigeons. Something that looked as if it had escaped from a stained-glass window: a long beak lifted towards the ceiling, wings cut out and filled in like lace, and a tail that unspooled into curls, each one tighter than the last, as though she was trying to hold a thread still. You asked her once where the bird was flying. She said it hadn't decided yet.

You kept the geography book, she says, before hello. You did. It sits in a box in your mum's loft with the spine taped twice. She tells you she has been drawing the same bird for thirty years and the tail never comes out right on paper. You tell her it came out right in pencil, on a page nobody else ever saw, and she laughs so loudly the caretaker looks over from the stacked chairs.

The lights dim for the slideshow, and photographs of a younger school flicker across the wall. Mr Ashdown finally finds the right glasses and reads your badge aloud, getting your surname wrong by one letter. Maren sets her cup on the windowsill and lifts one hand, fingers spread, then curls them slowly inwards. Still not decided, she says, and you know exactly which way the bird is turning.