Black and grey fine line tattoo down the side of a bare back, showing a bird neck, a dotted rain cloud and stacked open books with a small green sprout.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird, cloud and open books on a back

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A vertical composition runs down the side of the back, showing a stylised bird's neck and head rising above a patterned vessel. Above it, a shaded cloud sits in grey with dotted rain lines falling beneath, and below, an open book rests on stacked books with small trees and a sprout. Fine linework and dotted shading are used throughout, with pale grey tones and a few muted green and teal accents.

Fine line Dotwork Back Bird Cloud Rain Open book Book Tree Vessel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marguerite, the rain came back on Tuesday, the thin kind that hangs over Stowhythe like a dropped sheet, and I thought of you at once, standing in the doorway of the reading room with your satchel full of pamphlets about the Dunmore canal. You always said the heron would come back to the mill pond if we only kept the water clean. Well, the water is clean now. Mr Ashby drained the vessel he kept his cuttings in, the big glazed pot with the diamond bands, and filled it with rainwater for the swan he has been feeding since spring.

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The swan is not well. It holds its neck at an angle that makes the children laugh and the vicar frown, and it will not eat from the hand anymore, only from the pot's rim where the water pools. I sat with it on Thursday for an hour. It looked at me the way the librarian looks at a late returner, patient and quite certain of the outcome. I brought up the atlas you left behind, the one with the foxed pages, and read it the entry about the sprouting grasses in the old reservoir. Some were planted by the monks, some by nobody at all, and the water keeps them.

Yesterday the cloud broke over the books in the window of the lending shop, and every volume on the bottom shelf swelled and opened to the same page. I watched it happen. Bring your umbrella when you come home, and tell your sister the swan has learned to drink from the sky.