Painterly tattoo of a bird in flight with black and white wings and an orange breast, placed on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flying bird on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A bird in flight with outstretched black and white wings, a black head and an orange-yellow breast, shown on bare skin across the upper back. Soft shading and sketchy grey linework define the wings and tail, with loose ink splatters and streaks around the bird. The composition is angled diagonally, with the tail trailing down towards the lower back and the subject's face not visible.

Back Bird Wing Flight Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had been coming sideways for two days when the bird came through my kitchen window, knocking the shutter off its hook and skidding across the flagstones. It was all black wing and gold waistcoat, and it landed on the bread board as neatly as a guest who had booked ahead. I stood there with a tea towel in each hand, not sure whether to shoo it or offer it crumbs.

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Tilley, the surveyor who had been stuck with us since Tuesday, looked up from his table by the fire. He had a notebook full of drawings of the pass, contour lines and little sketched cairns, and he reached for it without a word. "Don't move," he said. "It won't stay long." He dipped his pen in the sloe ink he used for lettering, and when the bird shook its wings, drops flew off the nib in a spray across the window glass. The bird rose in a rush of cold air and went back out into the white.

That night I dreamt of the road. In the morning the drifts had softened, and the lane to the valley showed grey at the edges where the wind had scoured it. Tilley was at the window with his notebook open. The page held the bird in pen, wings wide, and around it a scatter of ink he swore he had not made, black spots like shot, with one long thin streak trailing off the edge of the paper.

"It came back," he said. "Look at the tail." I looked. Outside, on the gatepost where the road turned for the pass, a bird sat with its wings folded, and its tail hung down past the stone like a line drawn to show us the way out. When we went to the door it lifted, but it did not go towards the valley. It went up over the fell, a dark mark against the white, until there was nothing left to follow but the snow.