Black and grey pencil drawing of a bird with feathered wings that curve up into a heart shape above its body, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged bird with heart-shaped wings

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a bird with its wings spread wide and raised into a heart shape above its head. The feathers are rendered with fine, detailed outlines and light shading, and the body is covered in small dots and scale-like marks. The design is drawn in greys on a plain white background, centred with the wings filling most of the frame.

Bird Wing Heart Feather

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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 bird came down on the slipway the morning after the storm, folding its wings in a way no gull ever managed, and I knew before anyone told me that it had come for Ewan's boat. My mother said it was only a fulmar blown off course. My mother had never once looked at a bird properly.

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The old people on Scarra say that when a sea-bird lifts its wings into a heart above its head, it is listening for the ones still out on the water. The dots across its breast are the scales of every fish the sea has given back, one for each boat that came home. I counted them while it stood there, nineteen of them, and I did not like the look of the last few, which were pale, as if still waiting to be filled in.

I walked the cliff path at dusk with a torch and a tin of Ewan's mother's shortbread, and the bird kept ahead of me, rising and folding, its feathers hissing like the tide over shingle. At the headland it stopped and spread its wings until they made a heart against the grey sky. Below, in the swell, a red hull rolled against the rocks, and a voice I knew was calling for a rope.

We carried him up the path that night, alive and cold as the stones. In the morning the bird was gone, but on the slipway lay a single grey feather, drawn as fine as a pencil line, and I keep it in the shortbread tin. When the wind swings north I take it out and count the dots on the back of my own hand, and there are still only nineteen.