Black fine line bird silhouettes and lettering tattoos across a woman's upper back, including the word freedom.

Bird and word tattoos across a back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair tied up is seen from behind, with her bare upper back filling the frame. Black bird silhouettes in flight are scattered across the shoulder blades and neck, alongside lettering that reads freedom, we only part to meet again, and a short two-line quote about being a bird. The lines are crisp and monochrome on a plain light background, and the tattoos look like temporary designs.

Lettering Back Bird Flock Freedom Text Script Quote Ornament Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the wind off the old reservoir keeps trying to get under my coat. You want the one about Osei Marrow and the swifts? Right. Four hundred winters back, when the towers at Salford still had glass in them, Osei kept the ledger for the Water Board, and every morning he wrote down what flew over the wall. The Council had stopped the birds years before. They said feathers carried the sickness, so the falcons were brought down and the nests were scraped from the gutters, and by Osei's time a bird was a thing you saw only in the picture books.

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But one grey morning a drift of swallows came low over the sluice gates, black as a torn letter, twisting like they were arguing about something. Osei dropped his pen. He was so taken with them that he went down to the water in his good shoes and stood there until the Board's men came looking. He never did give them a proper reason. He just pulled up his sleeve and showed them the words he had inked on his wrist the night before, in his mother's careful hand from an old card he kept in his breast pocket: we only part to meet again. They took him to the cells for that, and for a while the swifts kept coming back to circle the cell window, which the guards swore was a coincidence.

When they let him out he was stooped and nearly blind, and he walked every evening to the wall with a tin of crumbs. The birds came to him anyway. Last thing before he died, so the story goes, he told the young girl who brought his soup that if she ever saw a flock turn over the water, she should count them and say their number aloud, so something would remember. She is my grandmother, and she counted eleven. Eleven was enough. Now hush, the tide's turning, and somebody fetch the lamp before the swallows go to roost.