Black tattoo of a flock of birds rising from the upper arm, with a dark treeline silhouette fading into the forearm, on a man in a white vest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of birds and treeline on an arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A flock of black bird silhouettes rises from the upper arm towards the shoulder, with the birds becoming smaller and more scattered as they travel down the arm. Near the wrist, a dense dark treeline sits along the forearm, with solid black shapes fading into lighter grey shading and bare skin. The tattoo is entirely black and grey against a plain green backdrop, and the man's face is cropped out of the frame.

Blackwork Upper arm Forearm Bird Flock Tree Forest Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the last warden of Hollin Wood in the kingdom of Auberne, a post your grandmother held and her grandmother before her. The duty is simple enough: each spring at first light you open the wicker cages in the sycamore clearing and let the flock go. Nobody at court remembers why. The steward's clerk certainly does not, which is why he has come up the valley road with a writ, a surveyor and two carts of axes.

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He unrolls the parchment on your table while rain drips through the thatch. "Timber for the new harbour," he says, not looking at the window, where the black line of the treeline stands against the grey hills. You pour him a cup of nettle tea and ask him to count the trees with you before he counts the coin. He laughs, then stops, because the surveyor has already started tallying from the boundary stone, and his figures do not match the ledger.

By dusk the clerk has agreed to wait one spring. You open the last cage yourself. The birds lift in a loose spray off the clearing, some climbing high and quick, others dropping low to skim the bracken. They break apart over the ridge, and you watch the flock thin into specks until only the sound of wings is left, fading the way a bell fades on wet air.

The surveyor writes "one spring" in the margin of his book. Next morning the clerk rides back to court with a ledger that counts only the trees he can see from the road, and the wood keeps its shape a little longer. Each year the birds go a little further before they turn back. You have started keeping a second cage in the cellar, just in case, and you leave its door open all the same.