Colour neo-traditional tattoo of two birds in flight with red ribbons, spread across a woman's upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two birds and ribbons across the chest

Neo-trad · Chest · Colour · Photo

Two large birds in flight dominate the chest, with their wings spread and their heads angled toward the centre. Bold dark outlines and soft teal and grey shading give the birds depth, while red ribbons loop around them against a cloud-like background. The image is cropped below the chin, so only the neck and upper chest are visible, and the tattoo fills most of the frame.

Neo-trad Japanese Chest Bird Ribbon Wing Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rooks came down off the Corn Exchange roof a little after midnight, which is when I always expected trouble. I had tied their ribbons myself that evening, red silk cut from a sash my mother never wore, because the harbour office would only trust a message they could spot against the clouds from the quay.

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The first note was for the pilot cutter lost in the fog past Gull Point, asking for the bell at the lighthouse to be rung every minute. The second was for the widow on Sallow Lane, telling her the boat was in. I had written both in the same clumsy hand and tied them on what I thought were the right legs. The rooks reached the river and hung over the water together, wings wide, arguing the way crows do, and the ribbons wound round each other until they pulled taut.

I ran the length of the Sallow steps with the lantern, shouting for the bell-ringer, and by the time I reached the slipway the birds had settled on the rail as if nothing had happened. Their heads were turned in towards one another. The fog was thinning. Out past Gull Point a single light swung in answer to the bell, then another, and I understood that the rooks had delivered both messages at once, by the only route the tide allowed.

Mrs Cale came down the lane in her coat with her hair unpinned. I did not tell her which note had been meant for whom. The rooks had decided that already. They stayed on the rail until dawn, the red ribbons knotted into a single bright thread, and in the morning neither would let me take them down.