Person in a grey short-sleeved shirt and braces, showing a black tattoo of a flock of birds on the upper arm and a plant-like design lower on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of birds tattoo on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a person from the chin down, wearing a grey short-sleeved shirt, braces and a brown belt. A black tattoo of a flock of small birds in flight covers the upper arm, with a branching plant or coral-like design beneath it on the forearm. The image has a warm vintage tone and a soft vignette, and the tattoos appear to be in black ink only.

Upper arm Forearm Bird Flock Plant Coral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad taught me to count the terns before I could count the boats. Every evening they lifted off the breakwater at Saltmarrow in a ragged grey sheet, bent into a wind nobody else could feel, and he would stand at the net loft door with a mug going cold and say, forty-one, forty-two, as if the sky owed him an accurate figure.

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The morning Owen took the Gannet out past the bar, the birds were already up, scattered like thrown pepper over the harbour mouth. I tallied them from the wall. Thirty-three. I wrote it on the back of a tide chart so I would have something to hand him when he came in, because that was the sort of promise we made in our family, small and exact.

He came in on the second tide with an empty crab pot and a sea fan tangled in the rope, pale and branched like coral from some warmer water. Dad turned it over in his hands under the lamp. Those mean good weather, he said, though he had never once been right about weather.

I pinned the fan above the loft door, beside the chart. The next dusk the terns went up again, and I counted them properly this time, thirty-three, and then one more that broke from the flock to circle the wall, as if checking whether anyone was still keeping score.