Small solid black bird silhouette tattoo on the side of a finger, with a teal painted nail in the frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bird silhouette on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A tiny solid black silhouette of a bird in flight sits on the side of a pale finger, shown against a dark background. The shape is filled with black ink, with no shading or interior detail, and the bird's wings are angled upward. A teal painted nail and a second finger sit at the edges of the frame.

Hand Bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mari had stopped counting her crossings of the Bwlch after the fourth winter, but her hands still remembered the rope. That March the snow came off the tops in sheets, and the postmaster in Llanfair had a letter for the doctor at Cwm Dulas that could not wait for the road to clear. Her brother Dai had gone up the week before with the mule and not come down. Nobody in the village said he was dead. They only kept looking at the hill.

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She set out at first light with a lantern she did not bother to light, because the moon was enough on the crust of the snow. Halfway up, where the path bent around a cairn of grey stones, a bird came out of the cloud and dropped past her face. It was too early for a swift, but that was what it looked like, with its wings held up in a shallow V as if it were sliding down a rope of air. It turned and climbed, then waited for her, then climbed again, and she understood that it was going the same way she was.

She followed it over the ridge. At the cornice where the wind had built a lip of ice, the bird hung above a dark gap in the snow and called once, sharp and thin. Mari went down on her belly and reached with the rope. Below her, wedged on a ledge, was a mule with a broken foreleg and her brother's coat tangled in the harness, and Dai, numb but breathing, holding the animal's head against his knee.

They came down together at dawn with the letter still dry in her pocket. She never told the doctor about the bird. When people asked why the swifts had come so early that year, she said the hill had called them, and let them think she was joking.