Fine line black tattoo of a flock of birds, a dandelion and cursive script on the side of a torso, above the hip.

Bird flock and script on the side torso

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A flock of birds in flight rises diagonally across the side of the torso, trailing into a dandelion with drifting seeds and a line of cursive script below. The linework is fine and mostly solid black, with small shaded details in the birds and seed head. The ink is black and grey against warm skin, with a red top and dark denim jeans framing the lower part of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Bird Flock Dandelion Seed Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abernethy kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Steps, where the wind came off the water hard enough to lift the lids of the bins. Every September the starlings gathered over the harbour wall in their thousands, and every September she counted them from the back step with a cup of tea going cold in her hand. Her husband had said that a flock that size was a sign of something, and she had told him to mind his own weather.

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One autumn a lodger came up the steps with a single leather case and no booking. He was a thin young man who asked for the room at the very top, the one with the window that looked straight out to sea. He paid in coins he had counted twice. He did not unpack. Each morning he went down to the shore and came back with his shoes wet and his face quiet, and on the fourth morning he sat at the breakfast table and said the birds had come down to the dunes looking for him.

Mrs Abernethy did not laugh. She told him that in her grandmother's day, a person leaving for good would be walked to the end of the pier by a flock, and the trick was not to turn round until the last bird had passed over. He asked what happened if you turned. She put the marmalade in front of him and said you got a seed in your eye, and that was all anyone ever wanted to tell you about it.

In the morning the room was empty and the window was open. On the sill lay a dandelion clock with every seed still on it, and beside it a line of looping words in a hand she did not know. She blew the seeds out over the wall one breath at a time, and the starlings took them up and carried them inland.