Five small solid black silhouette birds in a diagonal line across the inner wrist and lower forearm of a person wearing a dark jumper and a ring.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Row of birds on the inner wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a woman's wrist and lower forearm, with five small solid black bird silhouettes arranged in a descending diagonal line. The birds are simple, filled shapes with no shading, set against pale skin. The dark jumper, hair and blurred background give the image a muted, low-contrast palette.

Forearm Bird Silhouette Flock Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Five swallows came down onto the mainsail the morning we cleared Finisterre, and not one of them had the decency to look as if it meant to stay. They sat along the boom like buttons on a bad coat, too tired to shake the salt from their wings, while Hobbes the cook stood at the galley hatch cursing them fondly and scattering oatmeal across the planks.

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They stayed three days. We gave them names from the bosun's list of the dead, which was a habit Captain Pryce never cured. Tully, Marr, Ash, Greenhow, and the smallest, who never landed without first circling the masthead twice as if checking the weather for us. On the fourth morning the wind swung into the north and the birds lifted together, not all at once but in a loose slant, each one peeling off from the last and falling down the air towards the grey swell like a line of ink running down a page.

I watched until they were specks. Then I went below and wrote it in the log, because the log was the only place aboard where a thing had to be true before it could be forgotten. Five swallows, going south. Wind north-northwest. Smallest one came back for a last look at the rigging before it went.