Woman seen from behind with a braided updo, showing a fine line tattoo of a flock of black birds rising across her upper back and spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of birds across a back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with a braided updo is photographed from behind against a pale sky with clouds. A flock of small black bird silhouettes rises diagonally from the left shoulder blade down along the spine. The birds are simple, unshaded outlines in black ink, with varied sizes and angles that suggest movement.

Fine line Back Bird Flock

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, there's no third stair left, so keep to the wall and give me your hand if you're frightened of the drop. There. Now sit where the roof used to be and I'll tell you about the rooks of Carrick Hollin, because they're the reason this place has no roof at all.

Keep reading

Lord Aldous Venn kept a hundred rooks in the keep, and he hated every one. They fouled his banners and cracked the chapel glass with their beaks. So when the autumn came he sent his steward, a thin man called Piers Garrow, up the tower with a bell and a torch to drive them out. Piers rang and shouted, and the birds rose in one black ribbon above the walls, then tore apart. Some went east over the marsh, some dropped to the river, and some went straight up as if the sky had a ladder in it. Piers watched them scatter and laughed, and that night the hall fell silent, because the birds had been what held the stones together, or so the old women say. Nobody knows.

The next morning the keep had a crack down its spine, and by spring the east wall had lain down in the moat like a tired dog.

What Piers never told anyone is that one rook did not leave. It sat on the parapet with its feathers puffed against the wind, and when he came near it looked at him with one eye, then opened its wings and lifted off, slow, on a long slant toward the clouds. Every bird that followed after was a little less solid than the last, until the sky over the walls was just sky. So if you ever see a flock lift off a broken wall, don't count them. Just wave.