Black and white photo of a bare back with a line of small black bird silhouettes tattooed from the upper back towards the shoulder, with hands visible at lower left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of birds across a bare back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a bare back and shoulder with dark, curly hair falling across the upper back. Five or six small solid black bird silhouettes in flight form a diagonal trail from the shoulder blade up towards the neck. The image is black and white with soft shadows, and the subject's hands rest at the lower left of the frame.

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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

The fifth bird lifts off the wire before you have finished copying the telegram, and you lose your place in the count. Six, you told Mr Ellery at the counter that morning. Six swallows had settled on the line outside the post office in Harrow Lane, and he laughed and said the Lord kept better accounts than the Post Office. Now the wire hums with nothing but the wind coming off the brickworks.

Keep reading

The telegram is short. The Carrick boy is coming home on Thursday's train, and there is no need for anyone to meet him. You sign the form, tuck the pencil behind your ear and walk out past the pump into the yard. Mrs Carrick will read it at her kitchen table tonight, and by supper the whole of Harrow Lane will know what she knows, which is only that he is coming and not what he will look like when he steps down.

You stand under the wire on the cobbles and watch the birds go. They rise in a loose diagonal over the chapel roof, each one a little smaller than the last, until the grey sky takes them and there is only the line of the wire and the brickworks smoke leaning east.

In the morning a single swallow is back on the wire, and you find you cannot be certain it is one of the same six. You decide you do not need to be certain. You take the pencil from behind your ear, open the ledger at a clean page and write the number one at the top.

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