Black silhouette tattoo of a bare tree with four birds in flight, placed on the side of the ribs.

Bare tree and birds on the side of the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a leafless tree with thin, branching limbs rises from a dark, flared base. Three birds in flight and one perched bird sit around the crown and upper branches, with the birds drawn as solid shapes. The tattoo is shown in black ink on smooth skin, with the composition running diagonally across the flank.

Ribs Tree Bare tree Bird Crow Branches Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are nine the winter the ash by the colliery gate loses its last leaves in a single night, and by morning the crows have come to it the way they come to the slag heaps, black and loud and certain. Your mam says they are waiting for the cage to come up. Your dad says they are waiting for their dinner. You believe neither of them, so you stand at the wall with your satchel and count.

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Three go up when the hooter sounds at half past six, lifting off the upper limbs and wheeling over the pit head, but one stays on the lowest fork as though it has been told to keep watch. Mr Hollis from the lamp room says a crow sitting alone is a bad sign. You ask him how many it would take to make it good. He laughs, then stops laughing, and walks off down the lane with his tin under his arm.

Your father comes up in the cage at seven, grey to the eyebrows, and lifts you onto the wall so you can see the tree. Its branches are black against the sodium light, thin as the cracks in a cup. He says the crows always come back to the same tree because it is the only thing standing tall enough for the men to find from the shafts, and he says it as if it were a comfort.

Next morning you find a single feather caught in the wall's coping, glossy as oil. You tuck it into your coat pocket and do not tell anyone. The birds are gone. The hooter sounds across the valley, and you go down to the gate to meet the cage anyway, because somebody has to be waiting for it, and the tree stands over you with its arms held out.