Black ink tattoo on a forearm showing a telegraph pole with wires, three birds perched on the lines and a bicycle below, in a blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Telegraph pole, birds and bicycle on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black ink tattoo of a wooden telegraph pole with crossarms and tangled cables, with three birds perched on overhead wires that run across the upper forearm. A detailed bicycle, with spoked wheels and a saddle, sits along the lower part of the arm. The piece uses solid black silhouettes and fine lines on skin with no colour ink, and the empty space around the wires keeps the composition open.

Blackwork Forearm Bird Bicycle Wire

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The line men came up the lane on Tuesday with a cart of new poles and a boy who could not stop whistling. Mr Ferris says the old ones had rotted through at the base and the wires had sagged so low the Hollins twins were hanging washing on them. They have put up three new poles between our gate and the bend where the forest starts. The crossarms are still pale and smell of tar, and the cables hum when the wind comes off the hill, which Mother says is the village talking to itself.

The birds took to the new wire before the men had even packed up. There are three of them most mornings, sitting in a row like people waiting for a bus that never comes. I counted them from the back step while the kettle thought about boiling. The greyest one always sits at the end nearest the pole, and I have decided that one is Mrs Ferris, because she never takes her eyes off the lane.

Your bicycle is still in the lean-to. I oiled the chain the way you showed me and took the front wheel off to true it, though I am not sure I got the spokes right. On Saturday I rode it to the post office in the rain, down past the forest edge with my hair soaked flat and no hands on the bars, which you would have called showing off.

Come home when the wires stop singing. I will be on the step with the kettle on, counting birds, and if you come up the lane on that old black bicycle I will not even pretend I was not waiting. Love, Ada