Close view of a bold traditional-style tattoo of a winged ball in orange and grey on a person's lower abdomen, above jeans with embroidered roses.

Winged ball tattoo on the lower abdomen

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

The image shows a tattoo of a small round ball with two feathered wings sweeping up and out from its top, positioned on the lower abdomen. The ball is shaded in orange and brown with dark grey outlines, while the wings are rendered in grey with fine feather detail. The shot is a tight crop of bare midriff and the waistband of embroidered denim, with a navel visible above the tattoo.

Traditional Other Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Hollin Bottom owned a ball that could fly, so when the thing came over the stile on the second Tuesday of October, humming like a wasp in a jar, my father said it was a hornet and went to fetch the spade. I got there first. It lay in the nettles at the edge of Crake Wood, copper-brown and round as a cough drop, with two grey wings folded tight along its shoulders as if it had been travelling a long time and was ashamed of the dust.

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I kept it in my apron pocket for three days. It was warm when I touched it and it never once rolled off the table. On the fourth morning the wings were open, and it hummed up to the rafter over the bread oven and would not come down until I offered it a crumb of the seed cake Mrs Ashby had baked for the harvest supper. She had said the forest was full of queer things since the fire at the sawmill, and that a thing with wings goes home when it is ready, not when you want it to.

So I walked it back to the wood at dusk, my hand cupped under it, and it sat on my palm like a held breath. At the first oak it lifted, circled my head twice, and went off between the trunks towards the sound of the weir. I stood there until the last light went out of the hedge. Then I heard, very far off, the small bright tick of something finding its way home.