Black ink tattoo of three bird footprints with a thin curving line trailing down the shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three bird tracks with a trailing line on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Three bird footprints in solid black ink sit across the shoulder, each with spiky toes and small filled pads. A thin black line curves from the top right down and across the shoulder, linking the tracks to the arm. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of mostly black ink on pale skin with some redness around the area.

Shoulder Footprint

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, 4 February. Frost on the sluice gate until ten, then the sun came over the top of Haddon Wood and the mud began to show its secrets. Three prints sat at the lip of the drain, each one as neat as a stamp: a long middle toe, two short ones spread wide, the little pads pressed in where the bird had stood its full weight. Mr Pask swears they are a heron. I say herons don't walk in threes.

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What kept me at it was the line. Beside the prints, something had dragged a single trail, thin as a pen stroke, curving off towards the reeds as though the bird had been hauling a length of rope behind it. Pask said it was only a wing tip brushing the ground. I went down on my knees and measured it with a piece of baler twine, and it ran longer than any wing I have ever seen on a bird that size.

I followed it to the far bank with the dog pulling at her lead. The trail thinned where the reeds closed over, and by then the light had gone low and yellow. I told myself I would come back with the camera. Instead I stood at the edge with the wind going through the stems and listened for something that was not wind.

Wednesday. Frost again, and the prints are back, three more, pointing the other way, out over the open water. Nothing dragged behind them this time. I measured them anyway. Same length as yesterday, and I cannot say why that makes me want to sit down in the cold.