Black and grey tattoo of a stylised thunderbird with outstretched wings, set within fine geometric circles and lines on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Thunderbird and geometric lines on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised bird with outstretched wings and a central face sits in the middle of the image, filled with solid black shapes and fine decorative patterns. Thin dotted and single lines form overlapping circles and a vertical axis that run behind and below the bird. The work is entirely black and grey on pale skin, photographed straight on against a dark background.

Geometric Dotwork Upper arm Bird Wing Circle Geometric line Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Hettie, the instruments came off the steamer on Tuesday wrapped in oilcloth, and Mr Calloway has carried the brass theodolite up the ridge twice already without once looking at the view. I am enclosing the sketch I made last night because you will not believe the chart otherwise. Every bearing we take from the point below the cannery falls onto the same two circles, one drawn round the other like ripples from a dropped stone, and a single vertical line runs through both as straight as a plumb.

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The old woman who keeps the store at the head of the inlet looked at my sketch for a long while, then pinned it to her counter beside the tinned peaches. She said the bird was there before any survey pegs, that it sits in the cedar on the far bank and has done since her grandmother came down to fish. Its wings open the same width as our baseline, which Calloway called a coincidence and I called an insult to his arithmetic. She would not say what the dots were for. She only tapped them with one fingernail and said they marked where the bird keeps its count.

This morning Calloway set the theodolite on the spit and swung the sight along the vertical line. It ran through the cannery roof, then the church spire, then the bird's own round eye, which sits exactly where the axis crosses the inner circle. He was quiet for a full minute. Then he wrote the bearing down, underlined it twice, and asked me whether the old woman would sell the sketch.

I told him she would not, and that I was not going to ask. The pegs can wait another season. I have copied the bearing onto the back of this page and am folding it into the envelope with the stamp I was saving for your birthday. Keep it somewhere dry. If the surveyors come back in spring they will find their line already drawn, and I do not think they will want to be the ones who move it.