Fine line black tattoo of small birds in a trail from behind the ear down the side of the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small birds trailing down the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A side view of a person with dark hair pulled back, showing a row of small black birds in flight that trail from behind the ear down the neck. The linework is thin and delicate, with the birds drawn in simple silhouette and a single fine line connecting them. The image is in natural tones, with a bronze-coloured earring visible and a plain background.

Fine line Neck Bird Trail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came to the wire every September, sixteen of them some years, sitting along the line between Holt Cross and the sluice like punctuation nobody had asked for. My father used to say you could read the weather from where they sat. High on the poles meant rain by morning. Down by the insulators meant the wind would drop and the marsh would go still enough to hear the chapel bell at Shallow Dyke.

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The summer I was nineteen I was sent out alone to splice a break near the sluice, and I was halfway up the pole when I noticed one bird hadn't left with the rest. It was small and a bit ragged in the tail, and it kept hopping along the wire toward me as if it wanted something settled. I told it to go on. It didn't. I wound the copper back and found the fault was a chewed sheath, nothing a rat hadn't managed before.

When I climbed down the others were already gone south, a dark thread lifting over the reeds. The ragged one sat on the cross arm, looking at the place where the wire ran into the dyke. I understood then that it had been waiting for someone to tell it the line was whole again. I said so aloud, feeling a fool, and it went.

I never learned that bird's name, though my wife says I tell the story differently every time. What I know is that in October the wire sang in the wind, and I listened to it for forty years, and I never once climbed a pole without saying good morning to whoever was sitting on it.