Small black bird silhouettes in flight tattooed across a shoulder and collarbone, shown in a black and white photograph.

Flock of birds on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A flock of around nine small black bird silhouettes in flight is tattooed on the upper shoulder, close to the collarbone. The birds are simple solid shapes with little interior detail, and they are spaced loosely so they appear to rise diagonally across the skin. The photograph is black and white, with soft light and a plain background, and the wearer's shoulder is partly covered by an off-the-shoulder top.

Fine line Geometric Shoulder Bird Flock Silhouette Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The geese came over the marsh road every October, but the year the mill burned, nine small birds came with them and never went on. Old Hennie Carrow swore they were swifts, though swifts don't fly in a crowd that size in the cold, and she told anyone at the well who would listen that the birds were counting the village roofs to see which ones still had people under them.

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Her grandson Tobias didn't believe a word. He was twelve and wanted a dog. But he noticed that the birds rose each morning from the chimney of the schoolhouse, banked over the church, and came down to the same stretch of wall by the lock gate, where the stones were warm. Nobody fed them. They fed on the midges over the water and on whatever the cattle stirred up in the lane.

In March the flood came early and the lane went under. Tobias waded out with a lantern to fetch the Pryce girl, who had got stuck on the bridge, and the birds came down low over the water, wheeling so close their wings hissed. He followed them without thinking, the way you follow a path you've walked before, until the ground firmed under his boots and the lantern showed him the dry hump of the old towpath.

When the water fell, Hennie made him sit on the step and told him the birds had only ever been counting. Tobias said that was a poor sort of magic. She laughed until she coughed, and the next morning, when he looked up from the lock gate, there were nine of them, scattered across the blue, rising as if they had somewhere better to be.