Black silhouette tattoo of a flock of five birds in flight along the side of the ribs.

Flock of birds in flight on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows five black bird silhouettes in flight, arranged in a loose diagonal flock that rises from the lower edge toward the top of the frame. The shapes are solid black with smooth, tapered wings and no interior linework or shading. The photo is taken indoors under warm light, with the skin and a dark garment at the lower edge visible around the design.

Ribs Bird Flock Flight Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At four in the morning Ward 7 at Coldharbour General sounds like a fridge with a cough in it. I was on my third cup of stewed tea when Mr Abernethy, who had been dozing since the lamps went down, asked me to open the window. The air that came in smelled of wet tarmac and the sea, which is forty miles off but turns up on the wind now and then.

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He wanted to see the gulls. They come over the car park before first light, heading inland from the estuary in a ragged line, five or six of them, sometimes more, their wings working as if they were pulling something heavy. Abernethy counted them out loud the way he used to count the coal wagons at Thorne Pit. "Four," he said. "There's always one that drops back." I told him I'd never noticed. He said that was because I was looking at the clock.

They came over just then, a loose diagonal, black against the grey that was only starting to become a sky. The one at the back dipped, caught itself, and climbed to the others. Abernethy's hand lifted an inch off the blanket and settled again. He didn't say anything else, and I didn't need him to.

His daughter arrived at six with a flask and a carrier bag of satsumas, and I went home on the bus with my coat open. Nothing about the morning was remarkable, except that I finally understood the counting. You don't count the birds to know how many there are. You count them so you can spot the one that's falling behind and wait for it to catch up.