Black silhouette tattoo of four flying birds across the left side of a torso, on the ribs, in a fine solid black style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four birds in flight on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Four black silhouettes of birds in flight are tattooed across the side of the ribs, each shown with outstretched wings at different angles and sizes. The solid black ink has clean, smooth edges with no shading, and the skin is lightly tanned against a blurred outdoor background. The birds are spread diagonally from the upper ribs down towards the waist, giving a sense of movement across the body.

Ribs Bird Flying bird Silhouette Flight

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fourth one was always the trouble, Ada said, pinching salt from a paper twist and flicking it at the gulls on the wall. Three of them had come back to Pellow Quay the winter the Sennen Belle went down off the Lizard, and they had sat on the chimney pots as if they were paying rent. The fourth had stayed out at sea, and nobody in the village argued with that.

Keep reading

Her grandson Tom, who was nine and sure of nothing except arithmetic, said birds did not come back from the dead. Ada told him they did if they had been promised. She kept a sea-chest of letters from men who wrote that their wives should look out for three birds and one that flew wide. The letters were scrawled on the backs of tide tables, and she read them aloud on Sundays because the vicar had forbidden it.

On the last Tuesday in October the wind came round to the south-west and the gulls rose off the slipway all at once, like a sheet shaken out. Tom counted, as he always did. Three cut the grey sky over the lifeboat house, and then a fourth swung out wide over the breakwater, long-winged and loose, and he lost his count, because that bird was not looking at the harbour at all. It was looking at the open water, as if it knew the way.

Ada wiped her hands on her apron. 'Well,' she said, 'that's the tally, then.' Tom did not ask what tally. He folded the tide table into his pocket and went down the steps to the water to wait for the boats.