Black and grey tattoo flash drawing of a large stylised wing with a rose window motif and a small figure, shown as a design with no body placement.

Winged design with gothic rose window

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey drawing of a large stylised wing made of jagged feather shapes, with a circular rose window of gothic tracery at its centre. A small figure stands in the lower section beside a smaller wing, with a thin sword-like line rising from it. Solid black shapes contrast with sketchy grey hatching on a plain white background.

Blackwork Wing Feather Figure Sword

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose was still missing its heart when the grey bird came down onto the scaffold of Saint Ebba's, and Marit, who had been sent up to sweep the glass dust, stood on the planks with her broom and did not run. The bird folded a wing that was made of lancet-shaped shards, each feather cut sharp at the tip, and it looked at her the way the old glazier used to look at a pane he suspected of lying.

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It wanted the window finished, it said, and the glazier had died with the centre unset. Marit said she was only a sweeper. The bird said that was how the last one had started too. She took the cutting knife from the sill, the thin one the glazier had called his sword, and when the bird lifted its smaller wing she cut one feather loose at the root. It did not bleed. It rang faintly, like a struck bell, and she set it into the empty circle where the tracery should have met.

The light came through that morning as it never had, and the whole of Varrow stood in the square with their faces turned up. The bird rose over the roofs and was gone, but the wing it left behind hung on the north wall of the nave, bright and jagged, and the rose beside it turned gold on every feast day.

Marit's name was never cut into the lead, because the glazier had always said a sweeper's name would not hold. But each dawn a small shadow with a blade in its hand falls across the flagstones under the rose, and the children of Varrow stand inside it to see whether the sky is still mended.