Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of birds in flight

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a flock of about a dozen black bird silhouettes in flight, with a larger bird at the top and smaller birds grouped toward the lower left. The birds are rendered as solid black shapes with ragged feather edges and no internal detail. The plain white background leaves the composition open, with the birds spaced to suggest upward movement.

Blackwork Bird Flock Silhouette Flight Crow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock keeper at Tarrow Bridge swears the crows have followed your boat since Christmas, though you have only ever counted the same eleven. You stand at the tiller with the windlass hooked on your belt and watch them lift off the brick coping as the gates groan open, black scraps flung up against a pewter sky, as if someone had shaken them loose from a wet coat.

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Ada Pyle leans on the balance beam with her flask and says that's a bad omen in some counties and a good one in others. You tell her you've never been to the other counties. She laughs, then looks past you to the lower lock, where the smallest birds are settling back onto the rail one by one, like late passengers finding their seats.

You named the largest one Mr Dunne, after the coal merchant who never paid you on time. He always goes first, high and off to the north-west, and the rest peel away after him in a ragged line that stretches back over the water. Every morning you wait for the stragglers to catch up. Every morning two of them hang behind, circling the lock as though they have forgotten the way.

At the top gate you cut the engine and let the boat drift. The cabin smells of paraffin and cold toast. You slide open the side hatch, shove the old tin kettle out of the way, and wait. Mr Dunne does not look back. The two stragglers come down low over the water, brush the roof once with their wings, and rise again, and this time you do not count them.