Close photograph of a small black silhouette tattoo of four birds in flight on pale skin, placed on the side of the body near the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four birds in flight on the side of the body

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Four solid black bird silhouettes fly in a loose diagonal line across pale skin, each slightly different in wing position and size. The shapes are filled rather than outlined, with crisp edges and no shading, and the ink is a single dark tone. The image is a close, slightly angled crop that centres the birds against plain skin.

Ribs Bird Flock Silhouette Flying

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Mrs Abernethy kept four starlings in a wire cage on the sill of her attic in Lantern Row, and every night when the gas lamps were turned low she opened the little door and let them out over the chimneys. They went up in a ragged line, each one a shade different in the wings, and the street learned to look up and count them. Four out, and four back before the milk cart.

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One November the count came up three. The fourth bird had been taken by the cold, or by a cat, or by nothing anyone could name, and Mrs Abernethy would not talk about it. She only set the cage down by the window and waited, the way she waited for everything, with her hands folded in her lap and the kettle ticking as it cooled.

On the third night a boy from the bakery saw a bird come down out of the fog above the canal, low and tired, and land on the rail beside the lock keeper's door. It was the fourth starling, or it looked like one. It shook its feathers, lifted, and then all four were circling the bell tower of St Ormond's, black against the orange haze, until the clock struck two and they peeled away towards Lantern Row.

At dawn they came in through the attic window one after another and settled on the wire. Mrs Abernethy shut the door on them and said nothing at all, which the boy understood to mean she had counted them, and that they were all there.