Black silhouette tattoo of a flock of birds in flight across a forearm, photographed against a dark navy background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of birds on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A flock of small black bird silhouettes in flight runs diagonally up the inner forearm, with the largest bird at the lower end and smaller birds towards the wrist. The solid black shapes have simple, flat linework with no shading, and the ink reads as dark navy against pale skin. The photograph is taken from a low angle with the hand softly out of focus in the background.

Forearm Bird Flock Flying bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls had left us three days out from Recife, and by the second week the men had stopped talking about them. Then at dusk on the thirteenth day, Aldous Penrose came up from the forecastle with a tin of ship's biscuit in his fist and said he had counted nine birds over the bow, flying low and heading north-east. He wanted to know if I believed in signs. I told him I believed in biscuit.

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Nine became eleven by the next watch. They came in a loose vee, the biggest bird at the back where the wind was strongest and the smallest tucked in at the front, so close to the foremast that I could see their wings working. Mr Hartigan, the second mate, went through the charts twice and found nothing but blue. The captain said birds over open water meant nothing, only that they were tired. Nobody believed him, and nobody said so.

On the fourteenth morning the flock was gone. Penrose stood at the rail with his tin, still unopened, and watched the empty sky. Then the lookout shouted, and there it was, a grey smudge on the horizon, the cliffs of the Azores lifting out of the haze as if they had been waiting for us to stop looking.

I still think about the small birds at the front, how they must have been the first to lose heart and the last to give up following the big one. Penrose never opened that biscuit. He gave it to me when we came ashore, and I kept it in my sea chest until it crumbled to dust.