Small black bird silhouettes in a scattered flock across a shoulder, in black ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of birds across a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of skin showing a flock of about twenty small black bird silhouettes arranged in a loose, drifting line. The birds are solid filled shapes of varying size and angle, with no outlines or shading. The image is taken at a slight angle with dark hair and green fabric visible at the edges.

Shoulder Bird Flock Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mo had counted the rooks three times before the bell rang for noon, and each time the number came out different, because the birds would not hold still long enough to be counted. They lifted from the stubble above Hollin Wood like a handful of thrown ash and bent themselves into a line that drifted west over the mill roofs.

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"Twenty-two," said Dad, who was mending the gate with a length of baler twine and no particular interest in birds. "Or nineteen. Stop fussing."

She had a slate in her coat pocket and a stub of chalk, because the schoolmaster had told her that anything worth noticing ought to be written down. She wrote the number and then, underneath it, the direction. The wind came up off the reservoir smelling of cut hay and diesel. Beyond the last cottage the trees stood with their feet in bracken, and the birds went over them, dropping and rising, small black shapes that looked less like birds than like the marks a careless hand leaves on paper while it is thinking about something else.

The summer her brother went for the army, the rooks had come down to the churchyard in a noise like tearing cloth, and afterwards nobody in the village could agree on whether they had been coming or going. Mo decided it did not matter. She stood at the gate with the slate against her hip and watched the flock cross the sky until it was only a scatter of punctuation above the ridge. Then she wrote one more word on the slate, and the word was come.