Fine line tattoo of a bird with outstretched wings and curling swirls below it on a person's upper back, with a small pink accent at the centre.

Bird with swirls on upper back

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A single bird with wide, outstretched wings is drawn in thin black linework across the upper back, with feathered tips on each wing. Below it, a long stem ends in several curling scrolls and spirals in black ink, and a small pink mark sits at the centre beneath the bird. The photo is taken close up and slightly angled, with the skin tone and a strap of clothing visible at the edges.

Fine line Back Bird Wing Swirl Scroll Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swifts came back to the tower block the week the lift broke again, and my nan said that was how you knew it was May. She stood on the balcony with a tea towel over her shoulder, shading her eyes, counting them in the sky above Ferndale Court. Seven, she said. Last year there were eleven. Something had gone wrong with the roof gutters and the nests had fallen out, and the council had put up netting that nobody could explain.

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I went up the back stairs with a roll of wire and a pair of pliers, because Mr Okafor on the fourth floor had asked me to help him fix the pigeon spikes before the next inspection, and because I wanted to be somewhere nobody was asking me to be sensible. At the top landing the window was propped open with a paint tin. Outside, a single swift hung on the thermal above the car park, wings pulled wide, dropping and lifting as if it were writing something on the air and rubbing it out again.

I watched it until my fingers went numb on the wire. Then I went back down to my nan, who was still counting, and told her the number was going up. She didn't believe me until the bird came down on the rail beside her, close enough to touch, and folded itself up like a shut umbrella.