Black and grey tribal-style bird tattoo with a swirling feathered tail wrapping from the ankle onto the top of the foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal bird and swirl tattoo on ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bird with a raised wing sits above the ankle, with its curling, feathered tail sweeping down across the top of the foot. The design is made of bold black linework with grey shading inside the wing and tail sections. The plain black background keeps the tattoo as the clear focus of the photograph.

Ankle Bird Swirl Feather Wing Tail

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop pretending you can't hear me over the fiddler. No one in this family has married without a bird in the story, and I'm not breaking tradition at my age.

Keep reading

Back when the lighthouse at Porthmellow still had a keeper who could read the weather in his knees, a bird came in off the Atlantic every spring with one wing raised, as if it were hailing a boat. Its tail curled behind it like a dinghy's wake, and wherever it touched the water the sea went smooth. Fishermen said it carried news. Mostly it carried gulls' gossip, but one February it carried something real.

Eliza Penhale had promised Tom Trewin she would wait for him to come home from the Newfoundland boats. She waited four winters, and the village had started setting an extra plate for her by mistake. So she went down to the cliff, tied a red thread to the bird's leg, and told it to find him. It flew three days into a gale that would have turned a lesser creature inside out. When it came back, its tail was singed at the tip and one grey feather was missing. Tom's reply was tied to the other leg, folded small as cigarette paper: Keep the lamp lit.

She kept it lit. He came home in June with a cough and a sea chest full of cod-skin purses, and they married in the chapel with the windows open so the bird could watch. It circled the tower twice and then went back to the rocks below the lamp, where it stayed. When Eliza died, it was still sitting there, tail trailing into the surf. That's why the swirl runs down toward the water. Now somebody fetch me a bread roll.