Shoulder tattoo of seven small solid black bird silhouettes in flight, running from the top of the shoulder towards the upper arm.

Flock of birds across a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Seven small bird silhouettes in flight are tattooed across the top of a shoulder, arranged in a loose diagonal flock. The birds are filled in solid black with simple, clean edges and no internal detail. The photograph is warm-toned, with bare skin, a dark strap top at the bottom edge and a background of bare branches.

Shoulder Bird Flock Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer to the fire, the warmth is for the old and the honest, and you are neither yet. Let me tell you about Brother Anselm and the seven swifts, because the bells were never rung for them and that is the whole trouble.

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Every autumn, when the reeds on the fen turned the colour of weak tea, seven birds came over the north wall at vespers and slanted away towards the sea. Anselm kept the tally. He had a slate propped by the cellarer's door and a stub of chalk, and each evening he drew seven small strokes, rubbed them out with his sleeve, and drew them again, because a count that is not repeated is only a rumour.

One year the abbot took the chalk from him. A monk who counts birds, he said, is counting his own leaving, and the Rule has no line for swallows. Anselm obeyed for a week. He stood at the gate with his hands in his sleeves and looked at the sky, and on the eighth evening the seven came over so low that he could see the mud still drying on their feet. The lead bird dipped above the herb garden as if to look at him, then rose again, and the flock bent its line northward, away from the sea, straight over the wall where the stone had cracked in the spring frost.

In the morning the gap was there, and a new slate was propped by the cellarer's door, and the abbot, who had not slept, found seven strokes already drawn upon it in chalk. Beside them, in a different hand, someone had drawn an eighth, and under it a single word that was not Latin: stay.