Small black silhouettes of birds flying up the back of a woman's neck behind her ear, with her hair in a braid.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flying birds up the back of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A row of small solid black bird silhouettes flies diagonally up the back of the neck, starting below the hairline and moving towards the ear. The shapes are simple and bold with no shading, set against pale skin. The photograph is taken from behind, with a braided blonde hairstyle, ear piercings and a red knitted top in the frame.

Neck Bird Flying bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at St Aldwyn's stuck between the third and fourth floors at twenty past three, which meant Ruth Pennock took the stairs with a torch in her teeth and a bag of cannulas on her hip. Nobody had told her the stairwell window would be open. Cold came in off the car park, and with it a sound like someone shaking a box of pins.

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Four small birds were circling under the strip light, swooping at the handrail and then at each other. One had its wing caught in the mesh of the fire door. Ruth had worked nights for nineteen years and had never once thought of a bird as something that could be frightened. She set the bag down on the bottom step and held her cardigan open like a sheet.

The birds went up instead of out, which was the trouble. She climbed after them, talking nonsense in the voice she used for frightened patients, until the landing window caught the first grey light and they tipped through it one after another, low over the bins and the ambulance bay, a loose line of dark shapes heading north towards the reservoir.

Her relief lasted until the fourth floor, where the lift doors finally opened on an engineer asking whether she'd seen anyone on the stairs. She said no. She had a clean sheet of pins in her pocket and the ache of the morning handover, and she thought, for no reason she could name, about the way the last one had cleared the roofline without once looking back.