Fine line black tattoo of small birds in flight and a scripture verse in script on a woman's upper back, with the sea behind her.

Birds and script on a upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind on a rocky beach, showing a black fine line tattoo on her upper back. Small silhouetted birds rise diagonally across the skin towards the shoulder, with a few lines of thin cursive script beneath them. The linework is delicate and the ink is black and grey, set against sunlit skin and a blue sea.

Fine line Lettering Back Bird Script Quote Text Swallow

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the lot of you, and mind the lift, because it still stops between the ninth and tenth floor if you lean on the wall. I'm going to tell you about Maureen Pell, who lived on the eleventh floor of Hollins House when the block still had its gold numbers on the doors. She kept a tin on the windowsill with crusts in it, and every evening the starlings came up off the grey river and lifted from the car park roof in a long rope, then broke apart above us like someone had dropped a handful of ash.

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Her son Terry had gone to sea at seventeen and wrote to her from ports she had to find on the back of a tea caddy. Every letter ended with the same line, copied out in his square capitals from a card on the chapel noticeboard. Nothing could come between her and what he called the love of God, which Maureen said was a lot to promise from a deckhand, but she pinned the letters to the glass anyway, one above the other, until the window looked like a gull's wing.

Then the council decided Hollins House was a danger to the public, and the men came with their clipboards and their orange hats. Maureen refused to leave until the last week. On the final evening the starlings came over the fence, dozens of them, and rose past her window in a slanting line, the way they always had. She stood with the tin in her hands and didn't feed them. She just watched them climb, one after another, until the last one was a speck over the river, and she said, quite plainly, that she had never once been afraid of the dark.