Small black silhouette birds in flight form a diagonal line across the side of a person's ribs in a black ink tattoo.

Flock of birds across the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A torso photograph shows a line of small solid black bird silhouettes rising diagonally across the side of the ribs, with the birds decreasing in size toward the top. The birds are filled in with solid black ink and have no internal linework or shading. The background is dark, the skin is pale, and the wearer's striped top is lifted to reveal the tattoo.

Ribs Bird Flock Silhouette Flying Ribs

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Halliwell had counted the birds twice before she let them go, because her father always said a bird missing from the basket was a bird lost to the city. Seven of them, grey-blue and restless, shifted on the wooden lip of the roof hatch while the streetlamps of Salford came on one by one below. The wind off the canal smelled of diesel and wet brick.

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She opened the wire door and the first one went straight up, then the rest followed in a ragged wedge, each a little lower than the one before. Ruth watched them climb over the chimneys of the converted mills, shrinking until she could only tell them apart by the way they tipped their wings. Behind her the radio in the loft played the shipping forecast to nobody.

Her father had kept this loft for thirty years. He had timed every race from a deckchair on this roof with a stopwatch and a flask of stewed tea, and he had never once let anyone clap when a bird came home. Ruth had not come up here to race. She had come because the flat was too quiet since the funeral, and the birds were the only thing that still had somewhere to be.

The last bird, the smallest, circled the hatch twice as if it had forgotten something. Then it caught the updraft and was gone over the viaduct. Ruth stood with the empty basket on her hip and realised she had been holding her breath for the flock to turn back. They never did. She went downstairs and left the hatch open for whichever ones would be coming home.