Tattoo of four flying bird silhouettes with pink, purple, teal and yellow washes across the upper chest near the collarbone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four flying birds with colour washes on chest

Chest · Colour · Photo

Four small black bird silhouettes in mid-flight are spread diagonally across the upper chest, with the largest near the collarbone. Each bird has a soft, blended wash of colour along its wings in purple, pink, teal and yellow-green, with the dark silhouettes left solid. The skin is shown in a close, slightly angled view, with a striped white and yellow top at the lower edge of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Eddie,

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You will not believe what the dyehouse did this week. Mr Pryce left the vats uncovered after the Thursday rain, and when the wind came off the moor it lifted a fine spray over the yard and settled it on the washing lines, the gutters, and the backs of the starlings that nest under the chapel roof. Mother says it is the devil's work. I say the birds look better for it.

Four of them went up off the chapel leads on Sunday as I was walking back from the shop, and I stood in the lane with a bag of potatoes going soft in my arms and watched them turn. One had a purple wing like a bruised plum. Another had gone pink at the edge, the colour of the sugared almonds we used to get at the fair. The third was teal, a clean sea colour, and the last had caught the yellow-green from the rinse tank, which is the shade of new bracken before anyone has walked on it.

They did not fly away from town. They flew low over the dyehouse chimney and round once more, then went out across the allotments towards the reservoir, the four of them close together, wings beating the same way without anyone telling them to.

I am writing because I keep thinking you should be here to see it, and because you said in your last letter that London has no colour at all. Come home at Whitsun. Mr Pryce says the vats will be empty by then, and I expect the birds will still be wearing it.

Love, Ruth

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