Black silhouette tree with a flock of birds and pink and blue watercolour wash tattooed across the upper back and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree and flying birds on a shoulder

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A black silhouette of a tree with a spreading canopy and bare branches sits low on the back, with a flock of small black birds rising and drifting off to the right. Behind the tree, soft pink, purple and blue watercolour washes fade and run downwards, with blue drips beneath the trunk. The tattoo is shown on a bare back with a thin necklace visible at the top of the frame.

Shoulder Back Tree Bird Flock Silhouette Watercolour Sky Wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pigeon man rang at half past ten to say his van had died on the lane, and the crates of birds were sitting in the heat somewhere near the cattle grid. Nell stood at the bottom of the lower field with her shoes in one hand and her sister's veil snagged on a bramble, watching the guests drift up toward the oak as if it might still be asked to do something useful. It had been the place where Grandad Walter proposed to Joan in 1961, and the family had decided, somewhere between the vows and the speeches, that it should be the place where the release happened too.

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By twenty to twelve the wind had turned, and the old tree was throwing its shadow across the grass in long bars. Nell went to the van herself. It was not hard to lift the wire catches. The birds were restless and hot, and when the first one hit the air it went straight up past the canopy, then another, then a rush of them, so that for a moment the whole sky above the oak was full of small dark wings. Somebody behind her gasped and then laughed. The bride was crying in the way that looks like laughing.

Nell stayed where she was while the flock broke apart and bent eastward over the hedge. The tree stood on alone, black against a sky that had gone pink and violet at the edges, its branches bare as they had been all winter, and she thought that the birds had never really been the point. The point was the oak, which had watched a proposal and a funeral and now this, and would be standing here long after the flowers had been composted. She tucked the veil back over her shoulder and went up the field to find the cake.