Fine line black tattoo of four small birds in flight on the skin behind a person's ear and above the neck.

Small birds in flight behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small group of four black birds in flight is tattooed on the skin behind the ear, near the hairline. The linework is thin and precise, with the birds drawn as simple wing silhouettes of varying size. The tattoo is shown in black ink against a light skin tone, with a blurred urban rooftop and a large hoop earring in the background.

Fine line Neck Bird Flock Flying bird Silhouette

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now hush, the rain's only come to make you listen, so listen. You want to know about the four swifts? Stand closer to the fish, they won't mind the smell. Old Tobias Quill sold umbrellas off a barrow by the north gate, and the rain never once made him rich, because he gave them away to anyone who asked after the first drop.

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One wet Thursday a girl came running through the stalls with a shoebox held over her head like a roof. Inside was a jackdaw with one wing folded the wrong way. Tobias gave her his best black umbrella and sat her down on the apple crates. Her name was Nell Greaves, and she said her gran had told her birds carry the weather in their wings, so you could read a storm by how they flew.

Three days later four swifts came over the market roofs, low and fast, drawing lines across the grey like someone had lifted a pencil off the sky. They circled Tobias's barrow four times. Each time, one of them peeled away and dropped a brass button onto the cobbles. He gathered all four, and no two had the same number of holes, and none of them matched the coat he'd been mending for a boy who never came back for it.

So when the sky goes this colour, you count the birds. Four means the rain stops before the fish is sold. Count them, mind. The last one always turns back for a look at you.