Small black silhouette tattoo of two birds in flight on the upper back of a woman with wavy hair, with gold beaded straps draped across her bare skin.

Two birds tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, with wavy brown hair and a backless white dress with gold beaded straps draped across her back. A small black tattoo of two birds in flight sits on the upper back, near the right shoulder blade, drawn as simple solid silhouettes. The image is softly lit and focused on the tattoo and the gold strands, with a pale, blurred background.

Back Bird Silhouette Flight

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the years after the wells went dry on the Sallow Plain, the people of Harrow Reach kept the old custom of sending word by birds. Nobody living had seen a real bird, only the tin ones the Council wound up each morning, which hummed and never tired. But the grandmothers swore the true swifts still nested in the cliffs beyond the salt line, and that a message tied with gold thread would find its way home.

Keep reading

Mira Tollan, who kept the grain ledger for the eastern crib, had a brother gone over the salt with the work crews. She caught a grey swift in a net of brass wire, tied her letter to its leg, and hung a strand of gold cubes from her collar so the bird would know whom it served. The swift looked at the gold, then at her, and rose without a sound. She watched until the heat shook the air and it became a dot, then a smudge, then nothing.

Three nights later a second swift came down on the sill of the ledger room. It carried a scrap of cloth with her brother's knot on it. Beside it sat a black bird she had never seen, feathers like wet slate, and it did not want her letter. It wanted the gold. The grandmothers had said that two birds flying together were a debt paid both ways, one going out and one coming home.

She unhooked the strand and laid it on the sill, bead by bead, until the black bird took the last one in its beak and flew west. The grey swift stayed. At dawn her brother came up the road, thinner, with the same knot in his cuff, and she did not ask what the bird had cost. In the morning she tried the collar again and found the gold had never been hers to keep, only lent to her for the carrying.