Black silhouette flash design of three small birds perched on a branch with curling tendrils and leaves on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three birds on a curling vine

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows three black silhouetted birds perched side by side on a thin branch. A curling vine with spiral tendrils and small leaves extends from the lower left and trails off towards the lower right. It is drawn in solid black on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Bird Silhouette Vine Branch Leaves Tendril Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found its way under the tarpaulin again by ten, so I gave up pretending anyone wanted second-hand teaspoons and watched the gutter across the square instead. Three birds sat on the wire there, shoulders hunched, dark as cut paper against the grey. Dennis from the fish stall swore they were starlings. I told him starlings don't sit still that long, and he told me I'd know everything when I was his age, which is the sort of thing Dennis says.

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My nan used to say three on a line meant a letter was coming. Not a bill, she was particular about that, a proper letter, the sort you have to sit down to open. I stopped believing her long before she was gone, but I kept the habit of counting birds on wires the way other people touch wood.

So when a tin of bric-a-brac came in from a house clearance in Hebden Bridge and I found a folded sheet tucked inside a broken cigarette case, I read it standing up in the wet. The handwriting was small and slanted. It said: Meet me under the clock when the birds come down. Don't bring the umbrella, I want to see your face. No date, no name, just a pencil line under the last word, as if the writer had thought better of it and then not.

I shut the stall at four and walked to the clock tower with the paper in my coat. Nobody was waiting, only a bus idling and a man selling hot chestnuts to nobody. Then the birds came off the wire in one dark rush, three of them, and landed on the iron rail beside me, close enough to hear their feet tick on the metal. I stood very still, rain running off my nose, and waited to see whose face they wanted me to look at.