Small black silhouettes of birds in flight across a woman's upper back and shoulder, with a tree of life pendant on a chain around her neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of birds on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, with her dark hair in a loose side braid. Seven small black bird silhouettes rise diagonally across her upper back towards the shoulder blade, drawn in solid black ink with no shading. The pale blue background and soft natural light keep the focus on the tattoo, with a silver tree of life pendant hanging just below it.

Back Bird Flock Tree of life Necklace Braid Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rooks came down onto the stubble behind Coldharbour Farm just as the bus pulled out, and Edie Marsh, standing in the lane with a canvas bag of Co-op groceries, counted them the way her father had taught her to count sheep through a gate. Eleven. Then the dog from the forge started barking and the whole lot lifted at once, a black scribble against the grey Thursday sky.

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Dennis Parr, who ran the post office with a pencil behind each ear, had told her the birds went north in autumn and came back when the frost lifted, and nobody in Mardle Cross argued with Dennis about anything, least of all birds. He had given her a green clothbound ledger in March, bought from the stationer's in Spalding, and asked her to write down what she saw. She had filled four pages with counts and weather and the names of the men who had come home from Korea and the ones who hadn't.

Seven birds rose on the spring afternoon she was meant to be writing the dates. They went up at a slant, one after another, the way a hand lifts off a table, and she watched them clear the hedge and the telephone wire and the chimney of the old maltings. Seven, she wrote. Seven, going north. She did not write the rest of the sentence she had begun, which concerned a letter that had come on Tuesday with a Hamburg postmark and her brother's handwriting on the front.

Dennis found her on the bench by the churchyard wall with the ledger open on her knee. He studied the page for a long while, then took the pencil from behind his left ear and made a small mark at the foot of the column. "That one stayed behind to see the others off," he said. "Count it too, Edie. Somebody ought to."