Fine line tattoo of six small black birds in flight on the upper chest near the collarbone, beside a vintage cameo pendant necklace.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small birds in flight on upper chest

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a person's upper chest and neck, wearing a vintage-style cameo pendant with a pale rose on a chain. Six small black birds in flight are tattooed on the skin near the collarbone, drawn in simple, solid linework with minimal shading. The tattoo is black ink on neutral skin, with the warm tones of the cameo as the only colour in the frame.

Fine line Chest Bird Flock Cameo Pendant Necklace Rose

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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

Shift yourself, love, and mind the dust on the step. The wind's been off the salt flats all week and it gets into everything, the tea, the bread, the bones of a man. You want the one about the six birds? Then pour the tea and listen, because my grandmother told it to me with her hand over her heart, and I'll not tell it any quicker than she did.

Keep reading

Out past Dry Wells, where the tarmac gives up and the road carries on in gravel, there was a petrol halt kept by a widow called Edith Marrow. She wore a cameo at her throat, a pale rose carved in shell, which her husband bought her in Port Augusta the year before the road was sealed. Every October, when the heat broke a little, six black birds came over the ridge from the east. Always six, never five, never seven. They flew low over the pumps and Edith counted them aloud, the way you'd count children off a coach.

The year the drought took the bores, the birds came late, and only five came over. Edith stood by the pump with the rose gone cold against her skin and waited, and the lorry drivers laughed at her for it. A young man in a dusty ute, with nowhere he needed to be, stopped for diesel and asked what she was waiting on. She told him. He said birds didn't keep count. She said that was exactly why she had to.

The sixth bird came over the ridge at dusk, small and late, and the five wheeled back to meet it. Then all six turned south together, low over the gravel, and the rose at Edith's throat went warm as a held hand. The young man never forgot it, so they say, and he drove the rest of his life with the window down.