Black linework tattoo of two birds with spread wings across the upper chest, in a fine line sketch style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two birds in flight across a chest

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two birds with outstretched wings, one overlapping the other across the upper chest and collarbone area. The work is built from fine, mostly unshaded black outlines with sketchy, doubled lines and faint construction marks around the wings. The image is in black and grey with no colour ink visible, and the birds fill the frame from the left shoulder towards the right.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The second bird was already wrong by the time Margit set down her pencil, and she knew it because the first bird had been right for three days. She leaned over the drawing board under the strip light and counted the ghost lines she had left around the wing joints, seven circles, each one a place where she had moved a bone and then moved it back. The label in drawer fourteen read swift, rook, collided, roof of St Brannoc's, 1961. Nobody had bothered to say which of them had hit which.

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For the museum's catalogue she was supposed to draw each skeleton separately, clean and finished, the way the old plates looked. But the two bones had come out of the same gutter together, tangled in lichen and a length of rusted guttering, and when she laid them on the sheet the rook's wing ran straight through the swift's shoulder. She could not separate them without lying about the angle they had died at. So she drew them as they had been found, and the lines doubled wherever she had tried and failed to pull them apart.

Dev from conservation came past with his tea and stopped. 'You could tidy that up,' he said. 'Hide the construction. Nobody wants to see your mistakes.'

'They aren't mistakes,' Margit said. 'They're where I looked.'

He shrugged and went back to his boxes. She picked up the finest nib she owned and inked the last wing tip, the one that reached past the edge of the paper into the blank margin, where the two birds would keep going if anyone let them.

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