Black ink tribal-style design of a bird with outstretched wings and interlaced knotwork across its body, drawn on a pale background.

Tribal bird in flight design

Black and grey · Flash

A bird is shown in flight from above, with its wings spread wide in long, tapering black strokes. Its body is filled with bands of interlaced knotwork, dots and curling lines. The design is drawn in solid black ink on a pale, lightly shaded background, with no colour.

Bird Wing Knotwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow-keel had split on the Harrowsey reef, and Ailsa Corr spent the spring trying to draw the bird that would replace its figurehead. Her uncle wanted a gull. Every gull she sketched came out fat and grounded, legs dangling like an anchor half-hauled, and every one of them looked as if it had given up on the sea before it started.

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She tried the wings wide instead, the way the fulmars hung over the cliffs at Stacks End, long black feathers pulled out to the edges of the paper until they nearly left it. The body was harder. She filled it with the knot her grandmother had cut into the lintel of the net-loft, a chain that neither began nor ended, and she dotted it with the silver of the herring that followed the boats in each August. Held up to the lamp, the bird seemed to be turning in the air, its beak pointed at her own chest, as if it had heard her name.

Her uncle came up the loft ladder with tea gone cold in a tin cup and stood over the drawing for a long time. He said it was not a gull and never had been. He said a bird like that did not carry men over water, it watched them, and she should carve it in sycamore before the autumn gales. So she did, through a winter of shavings and burnt fingers, and on the last night before the launch she sat with the chisel over the tail and thought about closing the knot.

She left one loop open. At dawn the boat slid down the slipway with the new bird bolted to her bow, and as the hull met the swell the carved head swung round, slow and certain, towards the gap in the reef where the grey water opened out.