Black silhouette tattoo of a flock of small birds flying diagonally across the upper back of a woman with her hair in an updo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of birds across the upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair in a loose updo is seen from behind, showing a flock of small black bird silhouettes flying diagonally from near the shoulder blade up towards the spine. The birds are simple solid shapes in black ink with no shading, set against smooth, lightly tanned skin. The background is a blurred outdoor street scene with people and bicycles.

Back Bird Flock Silhouette Woman Hair

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swifts came down over the salt flats of Varenne every autumn, and every autumn the Queen's clerk counted them and wrote the number in a ledger that nobody read. Ysolt, the miller's youngest, counted too, but on her own slate, with chalk she had taken from the schoolroom. She counted nineteen the year her father went out to the river and did not come back.

Keep reading

The old women said the birds were once the drowned men of the kingdom, but Ysolt never believed it. She believed birds were only birds, that they flew because the air over the marsh was thin and cold and they had to keep moving to stay warm. What she wanted to know was where they went once the salt ran out. So one dawn she followed them north on foot, past the reed beds, past three villages whose people spoke another tongue, until the flock broke apart above a grey ridge and each bird turned its own way.

She stood on the ridge a long while with the chalk in her fist. Then she walked back down, slower than she had come. When the clerk in the square asked for the count, she told him nineteen. It was not the number she had seen that morning, but it was the one she could still see flying.