Small black silhouette tattoo of three birds in flight on the lower back, above dark jeans and beside a floral lace top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three birds on the lower back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

Three small solid black bird silhouettes sit in a diagonal line across the lower back, each in a different position as if in flight. The shapes are simple and crisp with no visible shading, and the ink is a deep black against lightly toned skin. The close crop centres the tattoo against a soft grey background, with the waistband of dark jeans and a floral lace top at the edges of the frame.

Back Bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Cook Ada Pell had been counting the birds off the stern since the Marjory cleared the Humber, and by the third day out she had them down to three. They weren't gulls, she decided, but terns, thin-winged and quarrelsome, and they kept to the rail above the galley hatch as if they paid rent there.

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Skipper Lowrie didn't care for birds aboard. He said they brought weather, and he had once tipped a dead petrel over the side with his own hands and told the crew it was bad luck to look at it. Ada fed the terns crumbs from the bread bin when he was up on the bridge, flicking them through the porthole so the crust skittered across the deck. Tomas, the youngest hand, said they were only after the crumbs, and Ada said that was how most people got through a winter.

On the fourth night a squall came rolling off the Dogger and the boat lay over so far that the pots slid across the wheelhouse and the kettle leapt off its hook. In the grey morning Ada found the rail empty and assumed the sea had taken them, the way it took most things it fancied. Then Tomas called her up from the hatch. Three terns sat on the coiled warp, wet and cross, each turned a different way as though they had come in together and argued all the way over about which direction home was.

Lowrie came down the ladder, looked at them for a long time, and said nothing at all. Ada set out three saucers of bread soaked in tea, and when she turned back to the counter she drew a short pencil line on the tally board beside the others, then rubbed it out and drew it again, a little steadier.