Black silhouette tattoo of a flock of seven birds in flight, running diagonally across the inner forearm towards the wrist.

Flock of birds on the inner forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a flock of seven small black bird silhouettes in flight, arranged in a loose diagonal line from the wrist down towards the elbow. The birds are solid black shapes with ragged edges and no interior detail, varying slightly in size and angle to suggest movement. The ink is set against pale skin, with a collage of photographs on a wall behind the arm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit still, you, and stop eating the plums before they've been properly looked at. Seven swallows came down over Pennock's orchard the August my father was eleven, and they didn't come for the fruit. They came for the wire. You'll see that wire yet, strung between the two old pear trees, and they sat on it like beads on a string, shuffling and chattering, working up their nerve for the long way south.

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My father's brother, Alfie, had a catapult and no sense. He wanted the smallest one, the one with a notch cut from its tail, so he climbed the wall at dusk with a jam jar. Our grandmother was out at the gate with a bucket of windfalls. She didn't shout. She just said, Count them first, Alfred. Count what's leaving before you take anything. So he counted, and there were seven, and then there were six, because the notched one had already lifted off while he was counting and gone low over the hedge toward the sea.

Alfie never caught a single one. He came down off the wall with an empty jar and a face like a wet Sunday, and grandmother gave him a windfall and a clip round the ear for good measure. Next morning the wire was bare. But that evening, if you stood in the yard and looked west, you could see them strung out against the last of the light, a loose line angling down toward the far field, the first of them high and the last barely clearing the wall. My father always said it looked like a hand reaching down to pull a sleeve back over a wrist. Daft, but there you are.

So when the dew comes up and the plums start to split, go and count what's leaving. Then let it go.

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