Black and grey photo of three small solid black bird silhouettes in flight, tattooed on the back of a neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three birds in flight on the nape

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

Three small solid black bird silhouettes are shown mid-flight, each at a different angle and size. The photo is taken from behind, showing the back of the neck and the top of a dark garment, against a plain light background. The image is black and grey, with the ink appearing as flat black shapes with no visible shading.

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

The census clerks of Velmoor were paid by the wing, so when the tax roll reached the marshes, Master Idris sent me out with a ledger and a pot of ink that thickened in the cold. I was sixteen and had never seen the sea that the map insisted lay beyond the reeds.

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On the third morning, above the drowned chapel at Oss, I saw three birds lift from the mud at once. They did not fly as a flock does. One dipped low over the water, one climbed high and hung there, and the third kept beating its wings as if it had forgotten where the others were heading. Each threw its own shadow across the reeds, and each shadow was a different size.

The ledger had columns for swans, herons and grebes, and a column called Unaccounted For that the tax men hated. I wrote the three birds down, then stopped with the pen lifted, because the middle one had turned back and now flew between the other two, and I could not tell which was lost. Idris would have counted one bird. The law said one bird per entry.

I wrote three, then crossed out the number and wrote the word together. The ink bled slowly into the paper. When the inspector came in spring he read the page, shrugged, and sent it on to the king, who never looked at it at all.