Black ornamental flash design of a bird with spread wings and a rose on its breast, with decorative linework and a ribbon-like tail at the base.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged bird with rose ornament

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a bird with wings fully spread, set within intricate ornamental linework and pattern. A rose-like flower sits on the bird's body, and thin ribbon-like lines curl beneath it. The design is shown in black on a pale grey-green background, with no body part visible.

Blackwork Bird Wing Rose Flower Ornamental pattern Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell had counted the keys every night for nineteen years, and every night there were eleven, though the house had twelve rooms. The twelfth belonged to a commercial traveller who had left in March owing four pounds and a glove. She had not let it since. The gulls would not settle on the sill of that room, but a black bird did, each morning at seven, folding and unfolding its wings as if reading a letter only it could see.

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On the Tuesday the wind came off the grey water so hard it rattled the sash, and the bird came in anyway. It hopped across the lino to the bedstead and dropped a length of blue silk ribbon at her feet, knotted at one end, with a rose beside it pressed so flat it was nearly paper. She knew the ribbon. It had tied the traveller's bag, and his name was written on a tag at its end in a hand that leaned badly to the left.

She sat on the bare mattress with the ribbon across her knees until the tide turned. Then she went downstairs, took the eleventh key from its hook, and unlocked the room for the first time in six months. Inside, the wallpaper was still printed with cabbage roses, and the window stood open a crack, as if someone had only just stepped out onto the cliff path.

She did not go looking for the man. She tied the ribbon to the bedpost, shut the door, and let the twelfth key hang where it always had, bright and waiting, on the board by the stairs.