Solid black silhouette tattoo of four flying figures in a descending line behind an ear, on the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flying silhouettes behind the ear

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows four solid black silhouettes of small flying figures arranged in a diagonal line, starting near the top of the ear and descending towards the neck. The shapes are filled with black ink with no shading or internal detail, and the outlines are crisp against the pale skin. The ear has two small stud piercings, and dark hair frames the right side of the composition.

Neck Silhouette Flying figure Figure Ear Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the one left holding the bucket when the boys go up the tip, and by the time you have set it down on the step they are already over the wall of the pit yard, four dark shapes against a sky the colour of wet slate. Jack goes first, as he always does, arms out as if he has been practising off the coal chute since he could walk. Then Tom, then Ned, and last of all little Billy, who stops on the top of the heap to look back at you as though he has forgotten something on the kitchen table.

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Nobody in Hartley Bank believes in flying. The men go down at six and come up at two and talk about roof falls and the price of tallow, and the women say the dust gets into the mind as well as the lungs. But the boys have been jumping off the tip since the strike started, and when you see them against the lamplight they do not fall. They drift, the way a moth drifts from the gas mantle, and they come down soft on the far side of the beck with their boots still clean.

Tonight the wind is coming from the west, over the screens and the engine house, and you hear Jack laughing somewhere above the wheel. Billy takes one step off the heap, then another, and his shape lengthens into the air, small and certain, a little behind the others like a sentence you have not finished.

You pick up the bucket again. It is heavy with water for the boys' tea, and you carry it indoors, leaving the back door open an inch the way you always do, so that four black shapes can find their own way home across the yard when the wind turns.