Solid black silhouette design of three birds in flight, arranged diagonally on a white background, suitable as a flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three birds in flight silhouette

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows three solid black silhouettes of birds in flight, arranged in a diagonal line from lower left to upper right. Each bird has outstretched wings and a tapered tail, drawn with smooth edges and no interior linework or shading. The design is rendered in pure black on a plain white background with generous empty space around the figures.

Bird Flight Flock Silhouette

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

Orla Brennan was on the stern of the Maud Kerr with a bucket of herring offcuts when the three birds came off the swell, one low over the wake, one higher, the last trailing well behind with its wings held stiff as a kite string. She had been told at the chandlery that gulls only shadow a boat for fish. She had fed them all week to prove it, or to prove her father wrong, and she was not yet sure which.

Keep reading

Eamon had sailed the Maud for thirty-one years and kept his tally in pencil on the inside of the wheelhouse door, one small mark for every crossing made without losing a man. Orla had started a column of her own the summer she turned sixteen. The birds were not in either column. Mr Sinclair, the skipper, said a bird that stayed with you past the Skerries was a bird wanting something, and that was generally your bread.

The wind backed west in the afternoon and the sea went short and grey. Somewhere off the Ness the lead bird banked hard, dropped its shoulder and swung wide of the boat, away from the open water the chart showed as clear. The other two followed it without a wingbeat wasted. Sinclair swore, then went very quiet, and let the Maud fall in behind them.

They crossed a reef no one on board had known was there, a long pale back of rock just under the surface, and came out the far side into calm water. Orla stood at the rail with the empty bucket and watched the birds climb away over the headland, not looking back once.

That night she took the pencil from its nail and drew a line across the inside of the door, not a mark for a crossing, but a thin bent stroke for the channel, and beside it, very small, three dashes in a diagonal.