Photograph of a large back tattoo of a black bird in flight and red flower splashes, with loose grey wash and fine linework on the upper back and spine.

Bird and red flowers across a back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A black bird with spread wings sits in flight across the upper back, with a second bird partly visible above it and a red flower bloom at the shoulder. Loose grey wash shading and thin sketch-like outlines run down the spine, with further red blooms lower on the back. The composition is mainly black and grey with bold red accents, set against a pale, plain skin background.

Back Bird Flying bird Flower Red flower Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thaw came late that year, and the Harrow farm was still under grey snow when the black bird landed on the gatepost. Old Mags Tully said it was a rook, but it had no grey at the face and it flew like something that had been thrown. It sat there the whole morning, wings half open, looking at the barn as if it owed someone a debt.

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Ned Harrow had buried his father in October under the apple trees, and since then the farm had been quiet in the way a field goes quiet after the crows have been at it. He threw crusts to the bird. It took none. Instead it went to the wall of the lower field where the poppies had seeded in summer, their dried heads rattling like teeth, and it pecked the stems one by one until it had a single seed on its tongue.

When the frost broke, it came back with the seed and dropped it in the mud beside the trough. Ned laughed at first. Then, in the grey wash of March, a red bloom opened there, and another up the slope, and by the time the ewes were lambing there were red flowers in places nobody had sown. The bird sat on the fence and watched them. When Ned walked out to it, it lifted and went low over the hedge towards the church, wings wide and black against the frost.

His mother said the bird was the old man come back to make sure the ground was kept. Ned did not believe that. He only knew he had stopped cursing the weather, and that every winter since, he leaves a handful of seed on the gatepost, and every spring the bird comes for it.