Black tattoo of flying birds and a dreamcatcher on the side of a person's neck, photographed from behind in sepia tones.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birds and dreamcatcher on the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a person's neck and upper back, with hair pulled up and a window light on the left. Several simple solid black silhouetted birds fly in a loose diagonal trail, beside an outlined dreamcatcher with a hanging strand. The image is warm sepia toned, so the ink reads as black and grey and the composition is centred on the neck and shoulder.

Neck Bird Dreamcatcher Flying bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shutter on Button Street was still warm from the day's rain when Nan asked me to bring the last of the dreamcatchers down before the streetlamps came on. For twenty years she had hung them in the front window, willow hoops wound with red thread and a loose web of sinew at the centre, and nobody had ever asked what they were for. Tourists bought them for car mirrors. Students bought them for bedroom walls. Nan never told anyone what they were supposed to do.

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Across the road, the starlings were gathering on the telephone wire outside the chapel, fidgeting and shoving until the whole line sagged. Then, all at once, they dropped off it and went over the rooftops in a loose diagonal, bending and re-bending like someone writing fast in the dark. I stood on the step with the hoop in my hands and watched them until the last one was a smudge against the orange sky over the docks.

The final hoop had a grey feather knotted into its web, one I hadn't seen when she first strung it. It was not a starling's feather. It was longer and paler, the sort that comes off something that has flown a long way. I asked Nan about it when I brought the frame through to the back room. She was counting change into a tin and didn't look up. "It's for what you don't want," she said. "Snagged, not kept. You shake it out in the morning."

I carried the hoop back out, hooked it onto the nail above the step, and let the wind move it. The thread turned slowly in the lamplight. Across the road the wire was empty, and the chapel clock struck eleven over a city that had not yet noticed the birds were gone.