Black and grey sketch-style tattoo of two birds and flowers across a woman's upper back, with dotwork shading.

Two birds and flowers across a back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers most of a bare back, showing two bird heads and wings in a loose sketched style, with a flower and a tree shape beneath. The linework is broken and feathery, and stippled dotwork shading creates soft grey tones behind the birds. The image is in black and grey with a dark background, and the subject's head is cropped out of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Back Bird Crow Flower Tree Feather Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The two black birds came down to the lych gate on the morning of the Pennock wedding, and by the time the bells started, everyone in Little Wenford had stopped pretending not to look at them. Old Mrs Gale counted them out loud, one for sorrow, two for joy, and then stopped, because the second bird had flown up to sit on the rowan the groom's grandfather planted the year the church roof fell in.

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Ada Pennock had wanted cornflowers in her hair and none of the florist's lilies, so her sister walked the field behind the mill at six with a basket and a pair of kitchen scissors. The flowers wilted in the cart on the way up the lane. Tom Abel stood at the altar with his collar too tight and watched the birds drop from the rowan into the grass beside the path, pick up the blue heads that had spilled from the basket, and carry them one each to the porch steps.

Nobody said anything. The vicar, who had been in the parish nineteen years and was not a superstitious man, cleared his throat and began. When he asked whether anyone knew cause why they should not be joined, the taller bird lifted off the step and settled on Tom's shoulder, and the other went to Ada's, and both kept very still until the vows were done. Ada said her words with a cornflower tucked in her glove. Tom said his while watching the birds, and got through them.

The story goes that the birds stayed on the rowan through the wedding breakfast, through the speeches, and through the first dance in the cart shed, and that when the couple walked home at dusk the tree was bare of leaves but thick with black wings. They did not follow. They waited until the last lamp was lit at the lane's end, then rose together over the mill field, and Mrs Gale swore to the end of her days that she counted two, and two, and two, and never one.