Flash sheet of around a dozen black silhouette bird designs, including hummingbirds, swallows and peacock-like birds, with no placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flash sheet of stylised black bird designs

Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of black silhouette bird designs on a white background, arranged in loose rows. The birds include hummingbirds with long beaks, swallows in flight, a peacock-like bird with a fanned tail and several small songbirds. The shapes are solid black with ornamental curls, scrolls, feather details and open negative space, with no shading or grey tones.

Bird Hummingbird Swallow Peacock Songbird Feather Flash sheet Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to Harrowgate the same week the scaffolding went up, and my father took it as a personal insult. He had spent eleven summers pointing the west wall with lime, and he would not have birds fouling the new work. So he tied a rag to a broom handle and prodded at the mud nests under the lintel while I held the ladder and pretended the drop into the bailey did not bother me.

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The nests came down easily. The stone behind them did not. When the loose mortar gave way there was a hollow in the wall, and in it a block of sandstone no bigger than a loaf, carved on one face with a bird whose tail fanned out in curls and scrolls, as if a wind had got into it. Dad turned it over in his gloves and said medieval masons carved things like that to frighten off the rain, then went back to his trowel. I kept it in my coat pocket all afternoon, where it warmed against my ribs.

That evening I climbed the ladder again with a tin of crumbs and set the stone on the sill where the nests had been. Dad saw me from the gate and opened his mouth, then closed it. He had never once told me to stop feeding anything.

Two days later the swallows were back, four of them, circling the scaffold with their forked tails cut open like scissors. They built on the bare ledge beside the carving, and nobody said a word about the lime. I still think about that stone. Somebody had carved the bird to be seen from the ground, and it had waited six hundred years for someone to bother looking up.