Black and grey tattoo of a stylised wing made of solid black shapes and horizontal lines, placed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised wing on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black tattoo of a stylised wing or bird-like form sits on the outer upper arm, with solid black shapes at the top and a row of horizontal lines running across the design. The linework is bold and the shading is flat black with no visible greys. The photograph is taken close up against a plain pale wall, with the tattoo filling most of the frame and another dark tattoo partly visible at the top edge.

Blackwork Upper arm Wing Bird Abstract shape Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire won't reach you from there, and I'll not raise my voice for the back benches. So. The wind came down off Scar Gate that February with a bird caught in it, a great grey thing, all wing and no body, and it beat against the shepherd's door at Hollin Cross until the latch gave way.

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Tom Ashby was the one who opened it. He was a careful man who counted his ewes twice and his sins once, and he stood there with the lamp in his fist while the thing came in over the flagstones, shaking off snow in long dark ribbons. Its feathers were not feathers at all, he swore to his mother after. They were slats of slate-black, cut clean as if someone had raked them through the sleet, and between each slat ran a pale line where the lamplight went through.

He tried to shut the door. The bird folded itself against the hearth and waited, the way a debtor waits. Ashby asked what it wanted. It said nothing, but it lifted one black wingtip and pointed out at the pass, where the old road bends under the cairn and the drovers' lanterns used to be seen.

So he went, with a rope and the lamp, and the bird walked ahead of him up the drift like a bailiff with no patience. At the cairn the wind stopped dead. Under the stones lay a mule's bell, a child's shoe and a tin box with his own name painted on the lid, dated the year he was born. He carried the box home. The bird was gone from the hearth by morning, and the wind has come down Scar Gate every winter since, but it has never once knocked.