Black fine line tattoo of a flock of birds flying diagonally across the upper back, from near the shoulder blade towards the spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of birds across a upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair in a loose bun is photographed from behind, showing a line of small black bird silhouettes flying diagonally across her upper back from the shoulder blade towards the spine. The birds are drawn with simple, clean outlines and solid black fill, with varied wing positions that suggest movement. The ink is black on light skin, and the blurred outdoor background with people and bicycles keeps the focus on the tattoo.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the fire. You want to know why the swifts never nest on the Gallow Col side of the mountain? Then listen, because I'll not tell it twice and my throat is already dry from the last telling.

Keep reading

Long ago there was a drover called Ansel Rhee who crossed the pass each autumn with three hundred sheep and a dog that would never learn his name. One year the snow came early, a grey week of it, and he found himself at the saddle with the light failing when a flock of birds came over the ridge towards him, low and loud. They were starlings, or swifts, or something older than either, and they did not fly the way birds fly. They broke and gathered and broke again, each one turning a little before the others, as if the whole flock were one thought being argued over.

Ansel stood with his hand on the dog's neck and counted them. Eleven, then nineteen, then he lost the count. The leader peeled off and dropped towards the scree, and the rest followed in a long slanting line, and where the line crossed the old cairn the snow had thinned to a path he could just make out. He led the sheep down it. Every autumn after that he watched for the birds and went where they went, and the sheep never once stumbled on Gallow Col.

Mind, when he died his daughter found a feather pressed in his psalm book, and it was not a swift's feather at all. It was a crow's, black as the ink. Some say the flock had been his own dead, flying the line home. I say only that the birds still come over the saddle every October, and whoever follows them comes down alive. Now drink up, and tell me who has the next round.

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