Small solid black silhouette tattoo of five birds flying diagonally up the inner wrist of a person wearing a white knitted jumper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five birds flying up a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Five small black bird silhouettes are arranged in a diagonal line rising from the inner wrist towards the forearm. The birds have simple solid fills with no interior detail, and the ink is a deep black on pale skin. The photograph is taken at a close angle with a warm, dim background, a white knitted sleeve and long dark hair visible around the arm.

Forearm Bird Flock Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shooting gallery sits at the far end of the field, past the dodgems and the smell of frying onions, and it has been yours since your uncle's hands got too unsteady for the tin. Every evening you pull back the canvas, oil the trigger and set out the row of birds on their wire: five black cut-out swallows that Mrs Abernethy painted before you were born, and nobody has had the heart to replace them. Nobody ever knocks down the last two. The men on the waltzer say it's the angle, or the sag in the wire.

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October comes, the rides come down in pieces, and the lorries leave the field one by one. On the final night a lad from the generator crew leans on your counter and offers a pound for a go. You tell him the gallery is shut. He laughs and says you've been talking to the birds again. You have, a little. You've been telling them where the winter ground will be.

You take the rifle down anyway and let him pay in coppers. You sight along the barrel and find, to your surprise, that you don't want to hit anything. You fire once at the wire beside the first bird. The pellet nicks the line, the swallows come loose from their hooks, and they lift one after another off the board, climbing in a slanted line over the caravans and the dark wheel.

By morning the field is grass and tyre ruts, and the gallery has been packed onto a flatbed. Mrs Abernethy's birds are gone. Somewhere south of the motorway, a driver tells his mate over a flask of tea, there's a flock crossing the lay-by at dusk, five of them always flying a little apart from the rest, climbing.