Black line drawing of a stylised bird with swirling curled wings on a white background, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirl-winged bird tattoo design

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised bird or phoenix-like figure with a small head, slender body and long tail, flanked by outstretched wings made of spiralling curls. The linework is solid black with no shading or fill, and the design is centred on a plain white background. It reads as a stencil-ready drawing with no body part visible.

Bird Phoenix Wing Swirl Spiral Line art

Find an artist for this

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

The fog came down on the Constance Jory so thick that I couldn't see the bow from the wheelhouse, and Danny Pascoe, who had been sick over the side twice already, swore the bird was up there somewhere, circling. We had been hauling pollack off Porthkennack for six days and the nets were heavy with more than fish. I had pinned my sister's drawing to the chart table in March, a black bird on a plain sheet with wings made of curls, like wind going round on itself. She said the spirals were how the sea breathes out. Nobody on the boat had given it a second look until Danny started talking to it.

Keep reading

At four bells something called out of the grey, high and thin, and the long tail of the bird seemed to trail over the water the way a fishing line does when the tide takes it. Danny reckoned it was a gull. I said gulls don't sound like someone running a finger round a wineglass. We throttled back and steered on the sound, and the sea went flat and oily under us, the way it does before it decides something. Then the fog tore open to the east and there was the harbour wall, the lamp on the end of it, and above it a bird turning in slow loops, its wings opening and closing in curls like rope coiling on a winch drum.

We brought the Constance Jory in on the tide with the lamp guiding us, and nobody spoke until the lines were fast. Afterwards I took the drawing down from the chart table and held it under the wheelhouse bulb. The curls on the wings were the same sweep as the coils we'd just flaked off the deck, and I could not tell any more which had been drawn first. I left the sheet pinned to the wall where it was, and I don't think any of us has taken it down since.