Black and white photo of five small solid black bird silhouettes tattooed on the inner wrist, with the palm of the hand visible below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five small birds on the inner wrist

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a hand and wrist with five small, solid black bird silhouettes in loose flight, scattered in a diagonal arrangement across the inner wrist. The birds are simple, minimal shapes with no internal detail or shading. The background is dark, which keeps the focus on the pale skin and the small tattoo.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Jack,

Keep reading

The canaries went down with the first shift again this morning, five of them in the wire cage that Mr Hepple keeps on the hook by the lamp room door. I stood at the gate with the others and watched him carry it past the winding house, the little yellow things hunched on their perch, and I thought of you, because you always said they looked like they were being punished for something they had not done.

Your father would have laughed at that. He said the birds had more sense than any of the men, since they knew when to be frightened and the men only knew how to swear. Mrs Dunn's boy says the cage went quiet on Tuesday and nobody thought anything of it until the deputy came up the drift at a run. Nobody was lost, thank God. The birds were carried out in a sack, and I did not look at them. Later, when the air was clean, Hepple opened the cage on the spoil heap and they went up all together, five dark scraps against the grey, scattering the way seed does when a hand opens too fast.

I am writing because the district is moving the lamp room to the new shaft in the spring, and you will be on the night turn. Keep your eyes on the cage, Jack. If the song stops, go, and do not wait to see why.

I have put a pencil mark on the back of the calendar for each day you have been down, and there are forty-one now. Come home on the Saturday and tell me about the birds, all of it, even the parts you think I will not like.

Your loving mother, Ada

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