Digital tattoo design drawing of black bird silhouettes flying along a swirl of watercolour splashes, with no body placement shown.

Black birds over watercolour splashes

Mixed · Flash

Black bird silhouettes in flight form a rising S-shaped path, growing larger towards the bottom of the composition. Soft airbrushed edges and speckled splatter sit behind them in blue, red, yellow, green and purple washes. The design is set on a plain cream background, with the colour washes framing the birds down the length of the image.

Bird Watercolour Splash Swirl Silhouette Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pigment room above the Halloran dye works smelt of linseed and wet chalk, and by October the starlings had found the broken skylight. Nell Ashdown swept them out every dusk with a yard broom, and every dawn they were back, a dark rope unspooling over the vats. She said they came for the warmth off the boiler flue. Her brother said they came for the colour, because the pigments spilled off the drying racks and the birds drank from the puddles: blue, then red, then the green nobody could match.

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The spill that started it was a cobalt jar Nell knocked over the night before her father's funeral. She didn't mop it. She stood and watched the wash run under the racks in a long curving tongue, and it looked to her like a road going somewhere. In the morning there were birds on it, pecking at the edges, lifting off in a bunch when she moved, their shadows falling across the colour like ink on blotting paper.

Over the winter she let the spills run. Red bled into yellow, yellow into a bruised purple, and the birds kept feeding along the seams of it, each flock a little bigger and a little bolder, until their path climbed from the floor to the high beams. Her brother stopped complaining about the mess. He began leaving the jars uncapped on purpose and brought the apprentices up to watch the birds lift away over the yard.

By spring the lowest birds were so heavy with pigment they could barely clear the roofs, and the ones at the top had already gone over the hill toward the coast. Nell painted the last wash herself, a long S through the whole room. That dusk she left the skylight open and went home without sweeping, and for the first time since the funeral she did not look back to see whether they had come.