Close-up of a woman's inner forearm with a small black silhouette tattoo of five birds flying in a line towards the elbow.

Five small birds in flight on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman wearing a cream fleece coat and striped scarf holds her left wrist near her chest, showing a tattoo on the inner forearm. The tattoo is five small solid black bird silhouettes arranged in a diagonal line, each one slightly smaller than the last, giving a sense of movement. The photo is taken outdoors on gravel with greenery behind, and the face is cropped out of the frame.

Forearm Bird Flock Silhouette Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to the cannery roof the same week the tide went out for good, and Maren counted them from the pier the way her mother had counted fish. Five that first morning, then seven, then none, because the wind had turned and the birds had gone south in the night without telling anyone. She kept the count in chalk on the inside of the boathouse door, a column for each season, and nobody asked her why.

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The harbourmaster's boy brought her a tin of paraffin and a letter from the mainland that said the cannery would close at Michaelmas. She read it twice, folded it into the pocket of her oilskin, and went back to the nets. The old men had stopped talking about the herring years ago. They talked about the weather now, and about the birds, and about which of them would be the last to leave the island.

In October a flock came in low over the water, dozens of them, and Maren stood up in the bow of the skiff with her hand on the mast. She did not count them. For once she let them go by. When she looked down at her own wrist, where the salt had worn a pale line across the skin, she saw that the chalk was still on her fingers from the door, and she wiped it on her trousers, and the tide turned under the boat.