Fine line outline of a bird with a small pink heart and a blue and pink ribbon curl, tattooed on the back of the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bird and heart on the nape

Fine line · Neck · Mixed · Photo

A small outline of a bird in flight sits on the back of the neck, with a tiny filled pink heart above its head. A thin blue and pink ribbon curls behind the bird's beak and body. The bird is drawn in fine black linework with minimal shading, and the coloured accents are kept sparse against the skin tone.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer and mind the fire, because this is the part about the ribbon. Your great-grandmother Nell had a length of blue silk the colour of the shallows off Carrick Hollow in March. The autumn her brother Tom went out on the Brightwater and the weather turned, she sat on the harbour wall with a grey swift resting on her knuckle, a bird that nested under the chandler's eaves and never touched the ground if it could help it. She knotted the silk in its beak so tight no gale could shake it loose, and she set the bird going.

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The swift rose off her hand and did not look back. It flew past the breakwater with the ribbon streaming behind it, thin as a pulled thread, and the gulls scattered like dropped paper. Nell hummed the hymn her mother sang over the sailcloth, and she kept humming until the bird was a speck above the Brightwater's lamp and then nothing at all.

Tom came home on the Thursday, sunburnt and cursing a broken mast. He found his sister on the wall with her hands in her lap and a pink wool heart pinned to her shawl. He said she looked like someone waiting for a letter. She said the letter had gone out and would come back when it was ready.

The swift came in at dusk the following spring, tired and ragged-tailed, and dropped the ribbon at her feet. The knot was still whole. Nell kept it in a tin with the sea glass, and when anyone asked why a bird would fly so far carrying a thing it could not eat, she only said it had been carrying something more useful than food.

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