Black silhouette tattoo of four flying figures in a descending diagonal line behind the ear, on the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flying silhouettes behind the ear

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows four solid black silhouettes of figures in flight, arranged in a diagonal line that runs down from above the ear towards the neck. Each figure is filled with flat black ink with clean edges and no shading, and they decrease in size as they descend. The close photograph shows pale skin, a stud earring on the ear and dark hair at the right edge.

Neck Silhouette Flying figure Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the reunion wanted to talk about the wall behind the bike sheds, which is how I knew it was the only thing any of us remembered. Dev Shah had printed a photograph from his mother's album, a grainy picture of four children mid-air above the tarmac, one shoe already coming loose. Somebody laughed too loudly and passed it down the table like a dare.

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Lewis Crane had led the game. Mr Okafor had told us the coping stone was a metre and a half up and that we would break our ankles, which was a lie we liked because it made us brave. We went in a line, Lewis first, then Dev, then me, then Ruby Marsh, who was the smallest and always last. We leapt from the wall onto the sloping shed roof and rode the gravel down in a rush of shouting. Ruby never landed cleanly. She always hung there with her arms out a second longer than seemed sensible, as if the air might hold her.

That summer Lewis moved to Leeds and the line broke. Nobody wanted to be first without him, so we stopped going up. Ruby waited on the wall alone on the last day of term, and when we looked back from the bins she was still standing up there, black against the sky, deciding. She came down the drainpipe instead, which Mr Okafor called cheating and which nobody ever forgot.

Ruby wasn't at the reunion. Lewis was, grey at the temples, and he stood up when Dev held the photo higher and said, "Look at the shadows." On the tarmac beneath the four of us, the sun had thrown our outlines down in a diagonal, each one a little smaller than the last, the final one barely a smudge at the edge of the drain. Nobody said anything. We just stood there, looking down.