Back of a person with a scattered flock of small black bird silhouettes tattooed across the upper back and shoulder blade area.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of birds across the upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A scattered flock of small solid black bird silhouettes rises diagonally from the lower left of the shoulder blade towards the upper right of the back. The birds vary in size and angle, with a few tiny dots trailing behind the larger shapes. The ink is solid black on warm skin, set against a plain grey backdrop with a floral strapless top visible at the bottom edge.

Back Bird Flock Silhouette Swallow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pell had counted the swallows on the telegraph wire every September for thirty-one years, and every year the number came out different, which she took as proof the birds were honest about being birds. This year there were nineteen. Mr Okonedo, who had taken the attic room in July to finish a book about tides nobody would read, leaned on the garden gate with his tea going cold and said nineteen was a poor sort of number for a flock.

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"They don't go in a line," she said. "They go up like someone's thrown a handful of pepper at the sky."

He laughed at that, and she didn't mind. He had a way of laughing at things a half-second after they landed, as if he had to carry them up the stairs first.

The wind came round off the harbour at four and the wire began to hum. The birds lifted together, not in order, the big ones first and the stragglers scrabbling after, until the whole scatter had torn itself diagonally across the sky above the chapel roof. One small bird stayed behind, circling the lamp post twice before it flicked after the others, and Mrs Pell found her hand pressed flat against the pocket where she kept the ledger.

She went inside and wrote nineteen, then crossed it out and wrote twenty, because the last one had been there, whatever the wire said. When she came back to the gate the attic window was open and a shadow was moving across the sill, so she left the back door on the latch for the night.