Black tribal-style bird with swirling tail feathers tattooed on the left side of a person's ribs.

Tribal bird tattoo on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black tribal-style bird faces left with its wings and tail made of bold, curling blackwork shapes. Thick, smooth linework and dense black fill give strong contrast against the skin. The design sits on the side of the torso with the tail sweeping down towards the hip, and a dark top covers the upper part of the frame against a black background.

Ribs Bird Swirl Tail Wing

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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

The fair came over Scarth Hill the week the swifts left, three painted wagons and an organ that wheezed in the wrong key. Old Mrs Quayle ran the tent at the end of the row, and she would not sell anything but the one thing nobody wanted: a bird cut from black iron, its head turned left as if listening for a train that had stopped running years before.

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Pardoe the mender bought it for a shilling because his wife was poorly and the doctor had said to keep something in the house that moved. He hung it on the bedpost. Every night the tail, a spiral of iron no thicker than a bootlace, uncurled a little further, and every morning it was curled tight again, and the bird sat facing the wall with its wings half lifted.

On the ninth night she sat up and asked him to open the window. The bird was gone from the post. Out over the hill a line of black shapes was lifting off the fair's canvas, swallows or something like them, wheeling in the grey, and the one at the front had a tail that curled like a question.

Mrs Quayle packed up that Sunday and was never seen on the row again. Pardoe kept the post. Some nights, he says, he still hears the faint ring of iron against the bedframe, and in the morning the spiral is loose, as if something has been trying to get out and has decided, for now, to stay.