Small black silhouette tattoo of flying figures and a bird across the upper chest near the collarbone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Silhouette figures in flight on collarbone

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo on the upper chest shows solid black silhouettes of figures in flight, with a smaller bird-like shape at the lower left, arranged in a loose diagonal trail. The shapes are filled with solid black ink with no shading, and the linework is simple and clean against the skin. The photograph is taken from a close angle that shows the collarbone and the strap of a grey top, with the person's face not in frame.

Chest Silhouette Flying figure Bird Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By eleven the rain had found its way under the awning, so I gave up on selling the cut-paper silhouettes and sat on my upturned crate, holding one up to the grey light. A swallow, a hare, a dog with its ears blown back. Nobody buys shadows in the wet. The boy came down the row with his hood up and stopped at my trestle, where the figures hung on fishing line and turned slowly, as if they were thinking about leaving.

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He pointed at the three that flew in a loose line over the scalloped edge of the card. A girl with her arms out, a boy with his legs kicked back, and a small bird tucked in below them. "Where are they going?" he asked. I told him they were following a lamp over the rooftops of a town that existed only in my cutting. He said he'd lost his shadow on the stairs last winter and his mum had never found it. I said shadows were bad at staying put, and that was the trouble with them.

So I cut him one. I set a bulb on the stall, sat him on the edge of the trestle, and traced his outline while the rain drummed the tarpaulin. The shape came off the card clean, all solid black and no fuss. When I held it up, it threw a second shadow onto the wet canvas behind him, and the two of them stood side by side for a moment, neither sure which was the original.

He paid me with a button from his coat and walked off without his hood. I pinned his silhouette to the awning pole where the drips couldn't reach, and when I packed up at four, it was still there, mid-air, flying the same way as the others.