Black and grey flying bird tattoos with one teal bird trailing down the upper back from the shoulder blade.

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Flock of flying birds across a back

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A flock of flying birds, shown as silhouettes with soft grey shading, travels diagonally from the upper shoulder blade down towards the centre of the back. One bird is filled in teal, while the rest are black and grey. The bare back sits against a dark background with white fabric draped at the lower edges.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every autumn the geese came over Skerra Head in their long crooked line, and every autumn old Morag Tulloch climbed the lighthouse stairs to shutter the lamp for them. The keeper before her had left the light burning, and the birds flew into the glass and dropped onto the rocks, so she turned the great lens to face the sea and drew the iron shutter at dusk, and the flocks passed in the dark by their own stars.

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One October a fog came down thick as wool, and the new hand, a boy called Davie Rennie who had crossed from the mainland for the winter wages, forgot the shutter altogether. Morag heard the first wingbeats through the glass and ran up the stairs with her skirts in her fists. The shutter had jammed on its rusted runner. She pulled the oilcloth from its peg, hung it over the lens with her own two hands, and stood there while the flock circled blind above the rock, calling to each other, wheeling closer to the glow that was no longer there.

At first light she found forty-one feathers on the gallery rail and one bird still sitting there, grey as the morning, with a teal sheen on its wing where the sun caught it. It watched her a long while. Then it lifted off and went west, low over the water, towards the mainland where Davie's mother had been keeping a lamp in her window all night. Morag folded the oilcloth and hung it back on its peg. She never again trusted the shutter to do its job alone.

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