Black and white photo of a bare back with a fine line flock of small birds tattooed diagonally across the upper back, with a small feather-like mark lower down.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of birds down the spine

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare back is seen from behind, with a flock of small black birds flying diagonally down the spine towards the lower back. A small feather or leaf-like mark sits lower on the right side, and a tiny symbol is visible at the nape of the neck. The black and white photograph uses soft natural light and a plain bedroom setting, with the subject centred and the tattoo as the focal point.

Fine line Back Bird Flock Feather Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls had given up on the rock by October, but the starlings kept coming, the way they always had, thin black threads pulled across the sky from the mainland. My father counted them from the gallery every evening and wrote the number in the log beside the lamp hours, as if the sea needed to know.

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On the night the wind went round to the north-east, the lens was hazed with salt and I was up the tower with a rag and a tin of brass polish, muttering at the glass. Below me the radio crackled with the Stornoway boat asking after the light. Dad was asleep in the chair with his boots still on. When the first flock came in low over the water, they didn't bother with the lantern at all. They flew straight past the glass and out over the cliffs, bending down the slope of the headland as though someone had drawn a line with one finger.

I went down at dawn and found a single feather caught in the rail by the door, grey-brown and curled at the tip. I put it in my pocket. Dad saw it on the kitchen table and said nothing, which was how he said most things.

The birds came back every autumn after that, and I learned to count them too. Forty-one, once. Nine, the year the boat didn't come. I still keep the feather in the log, pressed flat between the pages from the night the wind turned, and every time I write the number down beside it, in pencil.