Small black and grey tattoo of a bird with outstretched wings forming the stem of a musical eighth note, on the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged music note on the ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a bird with outstretched wings, its body curving into the stem of a musical eighth note whose solid black head sits below. The bird is rendered with fine outlines and grey shading on the wing feathers, while the note head is filled solid black with a small highlight. The tattoo is centred on pale skin against a dark, glossy backdrop, with the image cropped close to the foot.

Ankle Bird Wing Music note

Find an artist for this

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

Mrs Tweedie had put the piano in the back parlour because it was the only room that didn't flood when the sea came over the promenade, and nobody had tuned it since the summer of 1938. Ruth had been sent down from the Bristol shop with a fork, a roll of felt and instructions to be quick, because the guests on the top floor were complaining about the racket the swifts made in the eaves at dawn. She found the swift on the second morning, wedged behind the sounding board, its wings folded like a closed umbrella and one eye open.

Keep reading

She should have shooed it out. Instead she sat on the stool with the lid up and struck the A, the one that had been slipping flat for eighty years. The bird lifted its head. When she struck it again it sang back, a thin clean note that matched the string exactly, then dropped an octave and climbed a small tune that drifted through the open sash towards the grey water, its last note curling down like the stem of a crotchet.

Mrs Tweedie found her an hour later, still on the stool, pencilling the phrase onto the back of a tuning receipt. "That one's been in there since the war," she said. "Every guest who's sat down and played that piano has heard him." She took the pencil from Ruth's hand, wrote one more bar, neat as a Sunday hymn, and tapped the paper with a fingernail. "He's been waiting for someone to finish the tune."

Ruth stayed through the season. The bird came and went through the gap in the sash, and by September she could hold a whole phrase while he answered it. On the last evening she closed the lid. The swift perched on the rim of the piano and sang the final bar alone, and when it finished, the note hung in the room long after the bird had gone out over the sea.