Solid black silhouettes of three birds in flight on a wrist, with a second panel below showing six similar bird designs on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three flying birds on a wrist

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a wrist with three small solid black bird silhouettes in flight, arranged in a loose diagonal. The birds are filled with dense black ink with simple, smooth edges and no interior detail. A white panel below shows six similar bird silhouettes in various poses, which appears to be a design sheet.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm counted the swifts again, because the abbot had asked him to and because counting was the only work the cold left him. Three had come down onto the wall of the cloister garth that morning, black as cinders against the lime render, and then lifted off together before he reached the third step of the stair.

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The villagers below the abbey said the birds were the souls of the drowned fishermen from Saltmere, who could not rest until the bell at Holy Cross had rung for each of them. Brother Anselm did not believe it, but he rang the bell anyway, because the rope was heavy and the bell-ringer had a bad hip, and because a man with nothing to count will count the wrong things.

On the feast of Saint Brendan he rang nine times, one for each name the widow Maud had shouted up at him from the mud of the harbour road. Three birds rose from the yew and went west over the marsh. Two more came after them, then a sixth from somewhere he could not see.

By Lent the bell had grown quiet in his mind. He stopped counting the birds and started counting the flock, which seemed to him the better thing to do with a dead man's rope. When he finally climbed to the wall in March, the sky over Saltmere was empty except for three small shapes, bent into the wind, flying the same way, not looking back.

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