Dark teal tribal-style bird tattoo with a swirling tail on the inner wrist of a raised hand against a black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal bird tattoo on the wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A raised hand with the fingers curled at the top of the frame, shown against a black background. A dark teal tattoo of a stylised bird with wing-like curves and a long, looping tail sits on the inner wrist. The lines are solid and bold, with the tail drawn as flowing strokes ending in curls, and the single ink colour stands out clearly against the skin.

Forearm Bird Wing Swirl Tail Tribal

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

Mair had counted the swifts under the eaves every June for forty years, and this year there was one fewer. The beans had gone limp on their canes, and the walled garden at Coldharbour seemed to know it before she did. Ruth from the village said it was the drought, but Ruth had never stood under the old pear tree at dusk and listened.

Keep reading

The bird arrived on the third evening, a dark shape with its wings folded tight, and dropped onto the sundial's rim as if it owned the place. Its tail split into two long streamers that curled at their ends like the tendrils of a vine. Mair stayed still. Her grandmother had told her that birds which came to a garden out of season were carrying something away, not bringing something in.

She followed it past the compost heap to the iron gate at the bottom of the lawn, where the latch had rusted shut before she was born. The bird slipped through the bars without touching them. On the far side lay a patch of nettles she had never been allowed to clear, and under them, pressed flat, a tin box with a teal ribbon wound round it, the colour of the pond at noon. Inside were seed packets in her mother's hand, dated the year the swifts stopped coming.

She sowed the beans again that evening while the bird watched from the sundial, its tail lifting and settling. By August the canes were green to the top. Mair never learned who had hidden the seeds, but every June after that she left the gate unlatched and let the birds decide what they wanted to take.