Small black fine line tattoo of three birds in flight, sitting behind a person's ear and running down towards the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three birds in flight behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

Three small black bird silhouettes are arranged in a diagonal line, each slightly smaller than the last, trailing from behind the ear down towards the neck. The birds are drawn with simple, solid dark ink and little shading, giving a delicate, minimal look. The photograph is taken from behind, showing a hand holding back fair hair, with the ear and neck softly lit against a dark background.

Fine line Neck Bird Flight 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

Right, sit down, the lot of you, you're not too grown for a story. Mr Pollard told this one in the Coronation Hall the year I was twelve, and he was ninety then, so I've had a long time to get it right.

Keep reading

Three swallows nested under the eaves of the old dairy at Hollin Farm. Every spring they came back from Africa, and every spring Agnes Thwaite swept their droppings off the step and swore at them, and every spring they came back anyway. One summer the eldest, a grey-throated bird with a torn left wing, stopped roosting in the eaves and started sitting on the school railings at home time, wheeling above the bike racks as if it were waiting for someone to finish their sums.

Agnes's girl, Ruth, left for the city at eighteen and wrote only at Christmas. The swallows went south each autumn, three of them still, but one always flew a little apart, dropping low over the valley road where the coaches came up from the station. Then the autumn her father died, Ruth came home on the last bus and found the dairy door standing open and the eaves bare.

On the window ledge, where the swallows used to queue for the warm, lay three small grey feathers, set in a line from the sill towards the lane, each one a little shorter than the last. She picked them up, and the story goes that she never once swept that step again.