Black and grey realism tattoo on a back showing a screaming woman whose hair breaks into flying birds, with handwritten script lyrics beside her and a tribal ornament at the top left.

Screaming woman with birds and handwritten lyrics on back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her head thrown back and mouth open in a scream is shown in soft, detailed greyscale shading, with her hair dissolving into a cloud of flying birds that scatter across the upper back. Handwritten script lyrics run down the left side of the design, and loose ink splashes and fine strokes add movement around the figure. The image is composed diagonally across the back, with a dark tribal-style ornament visible at the top left corner of the frame.

Realism Back Woman Bird Flying bird Hair Script Lyric Handwriting Tribal Ink splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ray,

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You will have heard by now that I've gone, so I won't pretend otherwise. Mum's car is still sitting outside the Shell at Coyote Wells with the keys in it, and I walked the last nine miles of the old 62 in my good boots because they were the only thing I owned that didn't belong to somebody else.

The heat out here does strange things to the sky. Yesterday a flock of crows came up off the salt flat at four in the afternoon, hundreds of them, and I stood in the road and watched them turn over the cattle grid as if someone had shaken a sheet out. Every time I looked back they were a little more like hair, black and loose, tearing off the top of the air. I thought of Gran's hair the morning she told us about the lease, and I opened my mouth and shouted at nothing until my throat hurt. Nobody came out of the cafe to see what was wrong. That was the point.

I'm writing this at a table outside a diner in a place called Harlan's Bend, which is not a bend and not Harlan's. The waitress says the road runs straight to the coast if I can stand the dark. I told her I can stand most things now. She laughed and gave me a slice of cherry pie for free, the cheap kind from a tin.

Don't send anyone after me. If you want to find me, look for birds going up off the flats in the afternoon, and you'll know I'm still shouting.

Love, Nell