Black and white photo of a foot with a small flock of black bird silhouettes tattooed across the top of the foot.

Small birds tattoo on a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot rests on a patterned rug, photographed in black and white with painted dark toenails. A small flock of simple black bird silhouettes runs diagonally across the top of the foot, each bird a solid shape with no visible interior detail. The image is high contrast and grainy, with the tattoo as the clear focal point against the pale skin.

Other Bird Flock Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad counted the birds the way other men counted money, under his breath and without looking up from the tiller. Forty-one starlings had come down on the wire above Stockport lock that morning, and by the time we reached the top gate there were more than I could hold in my head.

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"They'll go before the bridge," he said. "They always go before the bridge."

They didn't. They folded over the cut in a long dark ribbon, dipping and lifting, and when the wind came off the moor they broke apart and knitted themselves back together over the towpath like a sentence somebody kept rewriting. I stood on the cabin roof with the windlass in my fist and watched one bird peel away from the rest, drop almost to the water, then climb back into line as if it had remembered an appointment.

Dad sold the boat that October. He left me the paint tins, a cracked enamel mug and a habit of standing still when birds go over. I still have the mug. Last spring I heard the starlings coming up the valley before I saw them, that rushing sound like a tide drawn back over shingle, and I walked out to the lock gate in my socks to watch them choose their line. Forty-one, I counted. Then I lost track, and that was the point, I think.