Small solid black silhouettes of birds scattered across the top of a foot, in a sepia-toned photo against a patterned cloth.

Flock of birds on a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

Seven small solid black bird silhouettes are scattered in a loose diagonal cluster across the top of a bare foot, with a few birds in mid-flight and others angled in different directions. The birds are filled with flat black ink with no visible shading or internal detail, and the sepia tone of the photograph makes the ink look dark brown. The foot fills the left and centre of the frame, with a floral patterned fabric in the background.

Other Bird Flock Silhouette Foot Flying bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the soup's going cold and I haven't reached the birds yet. Your grandmother's people never had a cloth on the table without a story folded under it, and this one is about Edwin Pascoe, who wanted to marry Ruth Hallam in the spring of 1931 with nothing to his name but a borrowed suit and a bicycle with one brake.

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On the morning of the wedding the bells stayed quiet because the ringers had gone down with the flu, so Edwin did what any fool in love would do. He walked up to the top field where the starlings came down every evening, stood in the stubble, and counted. Seven of them lifted off the hedge when he clapped his hands. Seven, mind, not eight, and he never said why. He only said that when they wheeled over the lych gate, every one of them was heading a different way, and the vicar, who had no patience for omens, said it was the most honest flock he'd ever seen.

Ruth laughed so hard at the vicar's face that she had to hold onto the gatepost, and the story goes that she never let go of it for the rest of her life. Edwin rode off on that one-brake bicycle to fetch the cake from Penzance, came back with the cake squashed flat, and nobody cared, because the flock had already scattered across three parishes and the sun was out.

So that is why, every spring since, seven starlings sit on that same gatepost and wait for someone to tell them which way to go. Nobody ever has. Now pass the bread, and mind the one with the bent fork, that was Edwin's too.