Two pairs of tiny black bird tattoos sit on the backs of two hands held together, in a minimal fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two small birds on linked hands

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are held together, with a pair of small black bird silhouettes on the back of each hand near the knuckles. The birds are drawn with simple, thin black lines and no shading. The skin is light and the background is a soft grey carpet with a dark red fabric at the left edge.

Fine line Hand Bird Hand Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At three in the morning the ward goes quiet in a way that makes you count your own breaths, so Dee had started counting out loud to keep us both awake. We had Bay Four between us, twenty-two beds and a radiator that knocked like somebody wanting in. Nobody else was on the rota until seven, and the tea had gone to tar in the staff room hours before.

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Mr Halloran in bed fourteen could not sleep either. He said he had watched two swifts over the car park every evening for a month, always together, circling the lamp posts as if they had lost something there. He wanted to know if they ever came down. I told him swifts sleep on the wing, which I had read once in a leaflet about the summer. Dee said that was rubbish and that they must land somewhere, even if nobody had seen it, and Mr Halloran laughed so hard he had to be given water.

When the bell went for bed nine, Dee caught my hand on the way past the desk and held on, not looking at me, the way you grab a rail on a moving bus. We walked like that down the corridor to the sluice room and back. Neither of us mentioned it. The lift stuck between floors for a minute on the way down to pharmacy and I did not let go of anything.

Halloran died a little after five, quietly, with his window open an inch the way he had asked for. We were there, and afterwards Dee went to the glass and pulled the curtain back. Two dark shapes crossed the car park, low over the bins, then climbed up past the roofline into the first grey light. "There," she said, and that was all either of us had to say about it.