Back view of a woman with a small black flock of bird silhouettes tattooed on her upper back, running from the neck towards the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of birds on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with dark hair tied in a ponytail is photographed from behind, wearing a grey vest top with white stars. A small flock of solid black bird silhouettes in varying sizes sits on her upper back, angled diagonally from near the neck towards the shoulder blade. The tattoo is in black ink on a plain beige background, with a hand resting on her shoulder at the left edge of the frame.

Back Bird Flock Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The whistle at the pit head went at six and the rooks lifted off the slag heap all at once, as if someone had shaken a sheet. You stood at the bottom of Clough Row with your tin on your hip and counted them, the way your mam taught you, because a count was something you could hold on to when the cage dropped. Eleven. Then nine. Then the stragglers, ragged and small, scattering over the chapel roof.

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Your brother Tom was on the early shift, third week running, and he'd promised to teach you to whistle the way the lads did, two fingers and a breath. He never did. Instead he left a note in the hall drawer: Gone to the tip for the racing pigeons, back by dinner. Don't tell Mam. You didn't tell her. You walked up the hill with the birds gathering above you in loose strings, and when they turned west over the reservoir they flattened into black cut paper against the sky.

At the top the wind smelled of wet coal. Men were coming up the bank in their tens, faces grey, and you looked for Tom's cap among them and didn't find it. The old deputy with the bad knee sat on the wall and said nothing, only lifted his chin toward the sky where the flock was thinning to a few specks, each one going somewhere different.

Tom came up the lane an hour later with a basket under his arm and mud to his elbows, grinning like a fool. You didn't ask him where he'd been. You counted the birds in his basket instead, and it was eleven, and you let yourself breathe.