Small black silhouette of three birds in flight on the upper back near the left shoulder blade, shown from behind with a long blonde plait and white lace bandeau.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three small birds on a shoulder blade

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a woman with a long blonde plait and a white lace bandeau. Three small black bird silhouettes in flight sit on the upper back near the left shoulder blade. The ink is solid and simple, with no visible shading, and the small motif sits against pale skin on a light, neutral background.

Back Bird Flying bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire has no interest in keeping you warm tonight, so you'll have to do it yourselves. This is about Brother Osric, who kept the dovecote at Saint Aldwyn's above the grey sea, and who was given three swallows in the spring of the great wet year, when the river came up over the mill race and never went back down.

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The swallows came in off the water on a morning of low cloud, three of them, thin as pen strokes, and they would not nest in the eaves like sensible birds. They built in the bell tower instead, against the abbot's express wishes, and every dawn Osric climbed the forty steps with a handful of crumbs to watch them go out over the marsh. The abbot called it idleness. Osric called it arithmetic: a bird that leaves has to come back, and a bird that comes back has to be waited for.

One morning in the harvest month the abbot's clerk came up the steps behind him, sour and out of breath, carrying a letter from the bishop that said the tower would be pulled down for stone. Osric read it twice. Then he opened the shutter and let the three swallows go, all at once, out over the sea wall toward France, where, the old stories said, the sun stays low and the grapes never rot.

They did not come back that winter, nor the next. The bishop was dead before the stone was cut. When the tower finally came down, the masons found three small nests packed with mud and feathers, pressed flat in the brick like flowers in a psalter. Osric lies under the north wall with his hands folded over nothing at all, and every spring the swallows come back to the place where the tower stood. Count them if you don't believe me. Three, always three, and now off to bed.