Black and grey realism tattoo on the back of a screaming woman with birds breaking into flight, with handwritten lyrics running down the left side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Screaming woman and birds on back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic portrait of a woman with her head tilted back and mouth open in a scream, her hair dissolving into dark smoke. A flock of birds bursts from above her head, with the wings fading into loose brush strokes and splatters at the edges. Handwritten lyrics in black script run down the left side of the design, and the piece is shaded entirely in black and grey.

Realism Back Woman Bird Flock Smoke Lyric Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last of the licensed choirs stopped singing the year the gulls came back to Halden Basin, and by then Mira Oyelaran had already stopped listening to anything the Concord said. I was nineteen and a runner for the Acoustic Office, which meant I carried sealed cylinders of approved speech from the lecterns up to the broadcast towers, and I never once opened them.

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The cylinder that broke on the stairwell of Tower Nine was stamped with the Concord's new line, a single sentence about obedience being the shortest road home. Someone had scratched beneath it in biro, in a looping hand that wasn't ours: what if I say no. The shards were full of grey dust that smelled of struck matches, and it got under my nails while I knelt to gather them.

Mira found me there. When the first of the grey-winged birds came down the ventilation shaft in a rush like a sheet being pulled off a bed, she threw back her head and screamed at the ceiling until the sprinklers sighed and the whole tower rang with it. The flock went up through the vent in a dark funnel, shedding feathers that turned to ash before they reached the floor.

Nobody came to arrest us. By dawn the broadcast towers were silent for the first time in forty years, and the lecterns in every hall were full of birds. I still have the cylinder's cap. I keep it on the sill, and some mornings I write the question on the wall beside it, just to see whether anyone answers.