Black script lettering of a three-line quote with flying bird silhouettes, tattooed across a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Bird silhouettes and quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black script quote reads There is no happiness without tears, No life without death, And no true love without heartbreak, set across the upper back. Five black bird silhouettes fly from the top right and trail down past the end of the lines, with crisp edges and solid fill. The image is a close, slightly angled shot in warm indoor light, with the text and birds sitting clearly against smooth skin.

Lettering Back Quote Script text Bird Flying bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The birds had been my father's, and when he died in March they came to me with a sack of corn, a biscuit tin of closed rings, and a rule chalked on the inside of the loft door in his square capitals: NEVER OPEN THE HATCH AFTER DARK. I kept it for six weeks. I fed them at seven, scrubbed the trays, and sat on an upturned crate listening to Sheffield come up through the yard, buses sighing on the ring road and a dog three gardens over that never stopped barking.

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On the Thursday a letter arrived from the racing club asking for the ring numbers, and I found the tin was one short, the ring with his name on it gone. I sat until the streetlamp outside flickered on. Then I did the thing the chalk told me not to do.

The hatch went up with a noise like a sash window. Twelve birds went out first, quick and low, then the rest of the loft poured after them in one grey hurry, and for a moment they were not pigeons at all but a shape the city had been waiting for. They climbed past the tower blocks and the lit windows of the hospital, and banked hard over the cooling towers where the sodium light caught their wings, so the whole flock turned at once like a page being lifted.

I stayed on the step until my feet went numb. Near four they came back one at a time, dropping onto the roof with the tired bump of birds who know exactly where their dinner is. I counted them in as they landed. Eleven came home. My father used to say you open the door and then you take whatever comes back. I shut the hatch quietly and left the chalk where it was.