Small solid black silhouette tattoos of figures in flight, arranged in a line along the side of an index finger, held near a woman's chin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flying silhouettes along a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a woman's hand, with an index finger turned to show a line of small solid black silhouettes. The figures appear to be in flight, decreasing in size from the knuckle towards the fingertip. The ink is crisp and uniform on pale skin, with black nail polish and a dark background of hair and neck framing the shot.

Hand Silhouette Figure Flying Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first hard frost came to Hollin Farm on the night the pump froze, and by morning Mags Thwaite had seen the lights go up off the tops again. Her grandmother had told her what they were. Every winter the fell-folk rose out of the bracken, one at a time, and flew down the valley towards the sea, and nobody on the farm was to call out to them or hold out a hand.

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Mags was nine and believed in very little except the hens. She kept the lamp lit in the byre window the way she had been told, and she counted. The first was tall and dark, arms out like a man falling in a dream. Behind him came a woman with a long skirt, then two more, and then the littlest, no bigger than a wren, who kept dropping and rising and dropping again until the others were gone over the dyke.

That was the winter the kitchen cat went missing, the ewes started lambing early, and her mother stopped singing at the sink. Mags did not ask why. On the twelfth night she took the hay fork and walked up to the bottom wall, where the little one had last been seen, and found it sitting on a stone with frost along its wings, too tired to lift.

She broke the rule. She held out one finger, and the small figure climbed onto it as if it had always meant to, and she carried it down to the lamp and kept it warm in her cupped hand until the sun came over the ridge. In spring the swallows returned up the valley, and one of them, the smallest, wheeled down and perched on the lamp hook in the byre, as if it had only stepped out for a moment and come back to finish a sentence.