Small blue silhouettes of birds in flight across a shoulder and collarbone, in a fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of birds across a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A small flock of about ten bird silhouettes flies diagonally across the upper shoulder and collarbone area, with the birds shrinking in size toward the top left. The birds are drawn as simple solid silhouettes with fine, clean edges and no internal shading. The ink is a single muted blue against pale skin, and the wearer's loose light grey top sits off the shoulder in the soft, plain background.

Fine line Shoulder Bird Flock Silhouette Flying

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The starlings came down on the spoil heap every evening that winter, and my dad said they were counting us. He had worked the Hartley seam until the seam ran out, and by March the men were standing outside the shop in their good coats, not knowing what to do with their hands.

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I took to walking up the back lane after tea with a flask of sweet tea and a bag of crusts for Mrs Tully's hens, though really I went to watch the birds lift. They rose off the heap all at once, a single dark sheet that folded and unfolded above the chapel roof, then broke into a line that ran off west towards Stanhope. The further it went, the smaller it got, until the last few were only specks you had to trust were there.

Dad came up the lane one evening and stood beside me with his hands in his pockets. He didn't say much. He said the pit had kept the village for a hundred and twelve years and had never been a kind keeper, but it had kept us. Then he asked if I'd seen the little ones at the back, and I said I had, and he said those were always the ones left behind, and always the ones that caught up.

We counted them together until the light went. Eleven, then nine, then eleven again when the stragglers found the line. I walked home ahead of him with my hands gone cold, and the last bird was still climbing somewhere above the slag, small enough to cover with a thumb.