Small black silhouette tattoo of three birds in flight on the inner wrist of a hand held palm up against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three birds in flight on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three solid black bird silhouettes are arranged in a diagonal line across the inner wrist, each shown with outstretched wings. The shapes are filled with flat black ink, with no visible shading or fine detail. The photograph is in black and grey against a dark backdrop, showing the palm, a silver ring and purple nail polish.

Forearm Bird Swallow Silhouette Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first bird struck the glass at ten past four, the way the migrants always did when the light came on early in the October murk. I went up the iron stairs with the cloth and the methylated spirit and found it on the gallery, a small dark thing with its wings spread as if it had been caught mid-turn. Mr Tennant, who had kept the light before me for thirty years, used to say the birds were not stupid, only hopeful. I had not yet decided whether I agreed.

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There were three that year. They came in from the north-east over the Skerry each evening, flying in a loose line that bent and straightened against the wind, and by the second week I could tell them apart by how they flew. The one on the left dipped its shoulder before every turn. The one in the middle never looked down. The third always stayed a length behind, as if it were waiting for the others to decide the way.

On the twentieth the wind backed to the south and the sea went flat and white. The supply boat did not come, and the radio gave me only static and a voice I could not place. I lit the lamp at dusk and sat with the logbook open, writing the weather and nothing else, until the first bird came tapping at the glass. Then the second. Then, a long time after, the third, slower than the others, its left wing held a little high.

I opened the lantern door and let the cold in. They went past me out into the dark over the water, three shapes, and turned once above the reef before the beam swung round and took them. I wrote in the log that the birds had gone south. It was the first thing I had written all week that I was sure of.