Woman seen from behind with a rainbow-coloured flock of small bird silhouettes running diagonally across her upper back, and a small black line tattoo on the nape of her neck.

Rainbow flock of birds across a upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

The photograph shows a woman from behind, with her hair in a loose bun, displaying a diagonal line of small solid bird silhouettes across her upper back. The birds move from red and orange at the upper left, through pink and purple, to blue and green at the lower right, suggesting a rainbow gradient. A small black line tattoo sits at the nape of the neck, and the plain textured wall behind gives the image a soft, even light.

Back Neck Bird Flock Rainbow Silhouette

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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 starlings came down on the allotment every October like a bad idea nobody had voted against. My father called them the committee. He'd stand at the shed door with his tea going cold and count them off the fence wire, red-breasted robins on the left, the blackbirds at the bottom, and then the flock would lift all at once and rearrange itself into something that looked like it had been planned by a draughtsman with a grudge.

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The summer he stopped being able to lift the watering can, I took over the beans. He never once asked me to. He just left the twine in a neat coil on the potting bench and a pencil on top of it, which was how he asked for most things. I learned that the orange cosmos wanted cutting back in August and that the courgettes would sulk if you looked at them before nine. I learned the birds came in waves, one bunch always a few seconds behind the rest, as if it had stopped to finish a sentence.

He died in the second week of September. We buried him with a trowel and nothing else, which was his instruction. On the first cold morning of October I went down to the plot with a flask and sat on the upturned crate. The fence wire was empty. Then a single bird landed, dark against the grey, and another behind it, and then the whole thing unspooled across the sky, colour rising off the fence in a long slant like someone had dragged a brush from the top corner down to the ground. I counted them. I got to forty and gave up, and I went home and wrote the thing on the back of an envelope that I still have, in pencil, the way he would have wanted.