Three birds in flight on the inner wrist

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of three birds in flight sits on the inner wrist, with the wings and bodies drawn as solid black shapes. The birds decrease in size from top to bottom, and the largest sits above the two smaller ones. The photograph shows a pale hand against a plain cream background, with the ink as the only dark element.

Other Bird Flying bird Flock

Find an artist for this

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

The snow had shut the pass for six days, and Nell Ackroyd had counted the rooks three times before breakfast. Three came down off the moor each dusk and settled on the chapel roof across the lane, always in the same order: the big one first, then the two smaller ones, never quite level, as if they were deciding which of them would land last.

Keep reading

Her father had pinned the coach timetable by the bar with a drawing pin and a curse. There were four guests in the snug: a surveyor who snored, two sisters from Keighley who played cribbage with a loud, greasy pack, and a man in a grey overcoat who asked for nothing and paid in coins he counted out slowly on the counter. Nell fed the fire, carried coal up from the cellar, and watched the window.

On the seventh morning the sky cleared in a hard blue line over Crook Fell and the ploughs came grinding up the valley. The sisters packed first. The surveyor left without his hat. The man in the grey coat paused at the door, looked up at the chapel roof where the rooks had already gathered, and said to nobody in particular that the big one always went first and the others only followed because they could not bear to be left behind.

Nell watched them lift together, the largest tilting over the fell and the two smaller ones riding the cold air behind it. At the top of the pass the last one broke away, circled the inn once, and was gone. She went back to the cold grate and found, pushed under the cribbage board, a single coin and a scrap of paper with three words on it: road is open, tell them.