Black silhouette tattoo of five birds in flight, arranged in a rising diagonal line across the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five birds in flight on lower back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows five solid black silhouettes of birds in flight, arranged in a rising diagonal line across the skin of the lower back. The birds vary in size and wing position, with the smallest near the waistband and the largest at the upper right. The ink is black only, set against warm skin tones, while a hand holds the edge of a white waistband at the lower left of the frame.

Back Bird Flying bird Silhouette Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The birds came off the Irish coast on the third morning, five of them, stacked against a sky the colour of wet slate. Halvorsen, the bosun, said they were lost, that gulls and terns only follow a ship for the galley scraps, but these had no interest in our leavings. They flew in a loose slant, the biggest at the front and the smallest tucked behind, as if it were being towed.

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I took the four-to-eight watch on the foredeck because nobody else would stand in the spray, and I started keeping a tally in the back of the logbook. Five at dawn. Five at noon. The smallest one dropped low whenever the swell rose, then clawed back up to catch the others, always the last to climb into the wind.

On the ninth day a squall came out of the west and the cook swore we would lose the whole flock. I went below expecting to find them gone. Instead, when the rain passed, I found them on the lifeboat's canvas cover, shaking themselves out, the small one wedged between two bigger ones. I wrote the count as five, crossed it out, wrote four, then could not decide whether I had seen right at all.

When we raised the Newfoundland shelf, the birds lifted off the rail together and went north-west into a clear sky, the big one first, the small one last and climbing hard. Halvorsen watched them go and said that was the trouble with the sea: it kept your count for you. I never learned whether the little one made it. The logbook is still in my drawer, and beside that morning there is a single pencilled bird, rising.