Black and white photo of a small fine line tattoo of three birds in flight on the upper chest near the collarbone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three small birds on a collarbone

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph shows a woman with long hair falling over one shoulder, wearing a zipped jacket over a white vest top. Three small birds in flight are tattooed on the upper chest just below the collarbone. The linework is fine and the ink is solid black, with the birds arranged in a loose diagonal line across the skin.

Fine line Chest Bird Swallow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My father counted swallows the way other men counted pennies, every evening in September, from the bottom step of the coal shed. Thirty-one on the wire by the chapel gate that year, and he wrote the number in pencil on the back of a seed packet. He said the birds knew the date better than the almanac, and when the count dropped in one night, we'd know the flock had gone south and the weather would turn.

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I was eleven and thought the counting was a kind of prayer. My sister Edie, nineteen and sharp as a bread knife, had a letter from a dress shop in Nottingham folded inside her Bible. She sat with me on the step and drew birds in the dust with a stick, three of them in a slanting line, the way they flew over the level crossing. 'That's how they go,' she said. 'Not all together. One leads and the two behind have to keep up or they get lost.'

The morning after the wire went quiet, the coach to Nottingham stood steaming outside the Crown. Father didn't come out. He stood in the doorway of the coal shed with the seed packet in his fist. Edie climbed up beside the driver, and then she turned and pointed at the sky over the church, where three specks were wheeling against the grey.

Father wrote a new count that night, though the wire was empty. 'Three gone,' he said, 'and that's all the sky needs to know.' I kept the packet for years after, and when I finally lost it, I found I could still picture the slant of those three birds, one leading, two keeping up.