Close photo of a black line tattoo of three birds in flight on a woman's shoulder, with a black strappy top and green trees behind.

Three birds in flight on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three birds in flight drawn as dark silhouette strokes, with one larger bird and two smaller ones to its upper right. The linework is simple and bold with tapered ends, and the ink is solid black with no shading. The shot is a close crop of the shoulder and upper chest against a blurred green woodland background, with the subject's face out of frame.

Shoulder Bird Flight Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The trestles were already groaning under bread and pickled herring when the miller's daughter came up the lane with her hem in the mud. Her father had told the whole parish the bridegroom would not be late, so nobody looked up when the church bell rang for the third time, nor when the sky over the water meadows filled with birds.

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They were not swallows. Old Tam Ferrier, who had kept bees for sixty years, said they were the three crows of Carrow Hill, and that they had once been the bridegroom's brothers before a wager with the drowned king cost them their names. Nobody believed him until the birds came down onto the long table, one large and two small, and folded their wings like men finishing a prayer.

Edwin stood up slowly. He had been a fisherman's son and had promised his brothers' boat would come home. He took the bread knife, cut the loaf into three, and set a piece before each bird. He said the oath was kept, but the sea had taken its price. The largest bird took its bread and rose, and the others followed it up over the chestnuts until they were only strokes against the grey.

That night the bride spread her blue shawl on the windowsill, and in the morning there were three feathers on it, long and black and tapered at the tips, as if they had been drawn with one pull of the pen. She kept them in the tin with the marriage lines, and she never once asked the birds to come back.