Two hands clasped together, each showing a pair of tiny black fine line bird silhouettes tattooed on the back of the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two small birds on clasped hands

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are held together, and each has a pair of small black bird silhouettes tattooed on the back of the hand near the knuckles. The birds are simple, solid black shapes with minimal detail, and the composition is a close crop on the hands against soft grey and maroon fabric. One hand has dark red nail polish, and the image is a warm, slightly soft photograph.

Fine line Hand Bird Silhouette Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swifts came screaming over Skelby Cross every evening in June, low above the gasworks, and Ruth and I counted them from the churchyard wall the summer her father lost the bakery. We were seventeen and certain that counting things would keep them from leaving. Ruth always got the odd number. I always got the even one, and she said that was because I was the careful one.

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That was the summer Mr Pargeter came through with his fairground caravan and a tin of needles. He worked from a folding stool behind the chip shop, mixing ink from lamp soot and a drop of gin in a jam jar, and he would do a bird for sixpence if you held still. Ruth paid for both of us out of her Saturday wages. He pricked two small swifts onto the back of her hand, then two onto mine, just by the knuckles, where the church gloves wouldn't cover them. They stung like a dropped match. He wiped the blood away with a rag that smelled of paraffin and told us swifts never land, not once in their lives, which was why they were always going somewhere.

Ruth sailed for Montreal on the Tuesday after the harvest supper. On the quay she took my hand and turned it over so the two of us were pressed palm to palm, and the birds on our wrists lined up like a pair of kites on a string. "Two's a pair," she said, and then the gangway was pulled and she was gone.

That evening I stood on the churchyard wall alone. The swifts came over the gasworks in their screaming tangle, and I counted them out loud, carefully, until I reached the last one and found it was only the two of them, flying side by side, neither landing.