Black silhouette tattoo of a flock of birds flying diagonally down the back of a neck and onto the upper back.

Flock of birds on the back of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A flock of birds in solid black ink flies diagonally from the nape of the neck down towards the upper back. The largest birds sit near the hairline and the birds shrink in size as they trail down the skin, which gives a sense of movement. The image is a close, slightly angled photo of a bare neck and shoulder, with a hand and hair at the top of the frame.

Neck Bird Flock Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the range has given up for the night, so you'll share my blanket and my bad knee. You want to hear about the Pryce boy and the rooks? Right. It was the back end of January, the year the lane flooded up to the gate, and young Tomas Pryce came up to Hollins Farm with a sack of mangels on his shoulder and a face like a wet Sunday.

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He'd lost his father's ewes to the sleet, and he wanted to know how my mother kept her flock from scattering. She laughed at him. You don't keep birds, she said, you only give them a reason to stay. Then she walked him out to the top field, where the rooks were lifting off the elms in a black rag, rising and rising. The big ones went first, the old hens who knew the weather, and the young ones trailed behind them, smaller and smaller against the grey, until the last few were just pins of ink on the sky.

Tomas watched until his neck ached. Then he asked what becomes of the little ones at the back. My mother said they follow the shape the front ones make, and they're never lost so long as they keep looking up. She sent him home with a jar of dripping and a loaf still warm from the oven.

He came back in March with his ewes all accounted for and a single rook feather tucked in his cap. He never said what he'd done with the sorrow, only that the lane was dry again. And every January since, I walk to the top field to count the flock, and I still get to the last one before the light goes.