Small black silhouette tattoo of a flock of birds on a woman's upper back, with her hair pulled up and her face turned away from the camera.

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 hair gathered up and one hand raised to her head. Five small solid black bird silhouettes flying in a loose line sit on her upper back, near the spine between the shoulder blades. The warm, soft lighting gives the skin an amber tone, and the simple tattoo is the darkest point in the composition.

Back Bird Flock Silhouette Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had come over the fell in a single night, and by six the lane to Thrush Cottage was gone. Mrs Ada Pennock stood at the back door of the Coldharbour Inn with a tea towel over her shoulder and counted the birds crossing the grey sky above the barn. Five. Always five, the late ones her husband used to call them, the stragglers who would not keep with the rest of the flock and went over the moor on their own.

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Tom, the potboy, came out with the coal scuttle and nearly walked into her. "They'll not make the pass in this," he said. "They'll come down in the beck and we'll have goose for Christmas." She told him to mind his tongue. The inn had three rooms let: a drover stranded since Tuesday, a surveyor from Carlisle who had not stopped complaining since he arrived, and a widow who came down for breakfast every morning and never touched it. Ada knew the sound of every board in the place.

The birds did not come down. They bent east over the chimney stacks in their loose line, one dropping back and then catching up, the way Arthur used to tap her shoulder when he wanted her to look. She had not told anyone he had been dead eleven years. The surveyor had asked her once where the cellar ledger was kept, and she had answered without thinking, as though he were still in the back room with his pipe.

By dusk the snow had stopped and the sky over the fell had cleared to a hard green. Tom found her still at the door. "They got through," he said, and she could hear he was pleased, a boy who did not yet know what a going thing costs. "Aye," Ada said. She went in and lit the lamp over the bar, and left the back door on the latch in case anyone came back the wrong way.