Close-up of a tattoo on the ribs showing four bird silhouettes in flight, the top bird in red and the three below in black.

Four birds in flight on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a tattoo on the side of the ribs showing four simple bird silhouettes in flight, arranged in a diagonal line that rises from lower right to upper left. The top bird is filled in red-orange and the three lower birds are solid black, with smooth edges and no visible shading or fine detail. The skin is pale and evenly lit against a dark waistband with yellow logos, and the composition is a close, straight-on crop.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Priya, you left your grey scarf on the back of a chair at the Crown, and I've been carrying it about in the boot of my hatchback for a week like a guilty conscience. I'm posting it with this note, so forgive the creases.

Keep reading

Do you remember Hale's drawing? He chalked four swallows across the top corner of the blackboard the year we sat our mocks, and the top one he'd scribbled red because he'd run out of black. He told us the red one always goes first and the rest follow when they're ready. Lorna laughed and said it was the most Hale thing he'd ever said. Then she was the first of us to fly, Perth by twenty, and none of us has been back to look at that board since.

At the reunion, Gareth asked the three of us whether we'd ever thought about the order we'd leave in. Nobody answered him. Lorna showed us a photo from her balcony, a sea of rooftops and one dark bird wheeling over the water. I thought about that for the whole drive home, the gap between the red one and the rest, and how I'd never once counted it as a gap.

So I'm booking the Lisbon flight for October, if Dad's knee holds out. Keep the scarf until I see you. And tell Gareth the sausage rolls were a crime.

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