Three solid black bird silhouettes in flight in a loose arc on the inner forearm, with a penny held beside them for scale.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three birds in flight on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of three solid black bird silhouettes in flight, arranged in a loose arc across the inner forearm near the wrist. The birds are filled with black ink, with no visible shading or greys, and the surrounding skin looks slightly red. A hand holds a copper-coloured penny against the arm beside the tattoo to show its approximate size.

Forearm Bird Flying bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third gull had a torn wing, and Captain Aske swore it was the same bird that had followed us out of the Humber, but I had stopped believing anything Aske said somewhere past the Azores. What I knew was that they flew in a loose arc off our larboard quarter, three of them, never closer than a cable's length and never further off, as if somebody had pinned them to the sky with a ruler.

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The men counted them at the change of every watch. Old Dunne said three birds meant three names still owed in the ledger of the sea, and he would not say whose. I kept my own tally on the back of a chart: one for the lead bird, one for the middle, one for the one that kept lagging. By the Plate my tally had become a superstition of my own, and I was ashamed of how often I checked it.

On the last morning the coast came up grey and low, and the birds began to turn. The lead bird banked away first, then the middle one, and the lagging one hung over our wake for a long moment, dipping its broken wing as if it meant to say something useful. I took the penny my sister had pressed into my palm at Hull, the one she said would bring me home, and I flicked it over the rail.

It flashed once and was gone. Dunne looked at me, and I looked at the sky, and there were three birds out there still, small and black against the white glare, sliding towards the land. I counted them twice before I went below. Then I counted them a third time, because I had never been good at believing a thing the first time round.