Fine line black tattoo on the ribs of a person in a black lace bra, showing silhouette birds flying above a small figure hung from thin lines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birds and a hanging figure on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several small black bird silhouettes in flight, linked by thin single lines to a tiny figure at the lower end that appears to hang from them. The linework is fine and the birds are solid black fills, with the figure drawn in outline. The design runs diagonally down the side of the ribcage against plain pale skin, with a black lace bra and dark open garment at the edges of the frame.

Fine line Ribs Bird Silhouette Figure Line Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pell had tied the last knot herself, because the rope-maker's fingers had gone stiff with the damp, and the swifts would not take a loop from anyone else. Nine of them waited along the gutter of the Quay House, grey as the slate, and when she held the cords up they came down one at a time and took the thread in their beaks without once letting go of the sky.

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Corran Sound was a flat kingdom of mud and reed, and nobody in it had ever seen past the cliffs of Hesk. The queen's surveyor said the land beyond was a sailor's lie. Pell had climbed the church tower twice to look, and both times she had seen only the silver flats, the thin dark line of the cliffs, and above them a sky that kept going. She did not argue with the surveyor. She simply wanted to see what the swifts could see.

At first light the birds beat hard, and the cords drew tight as harp strings. Her boots left the cobbles. Her mother's voice came up small from the harbour, then was swallowed by wind, and the town shrank into a patchwork of slate and gull-white. The birds did not turn for Hesk. They turned for the sun, and Pell felt the pull along her side of nine separate hungers, each wanting a different sky.

Over the sea they let her down by degrees. The first to release was a swift with a torn wing, then another, until only two were left, and she dropped the last few yards into warm marsh grass on a shore no map had drawn. She stood up, shaking. Above her the last swift circled once, then flew back towards Corran Sound, and Pell found she was already laughing and walking inland.