  A consequence of QCD axion dark matter being born after inflation is the
emergence of ultra-small-scale substructures known as miniclusters. Although
miniclusters merge to form minihalos, this intrinsic granularity is expected to
remain imprinted on small scales in our galaxy, leading to potentially damning
consequences for the campaign to detect axions directly on Earth. This picture,
however, is modified when one takes into account the fact that encounters with
stars will tidally strip mass from the miniclusters, creating pc-long tidal
streams that act to refill the dark matter distribution. Here we ask whether or
not this stripping rescues experimental prospects from the worst-case scenario
in which the majority of axions remain bound up in unobservably small
miniclusters. We find that the density sampled by the Earth on mpc-scales will
be, on average, around 70-90% of the known local DM density, and at a typical
point in the solar neighbourhood, we expect most of the dark matter to be
comprised of debris from $\mathcal{O}(10^2$-$10^3)$ overlapping streams. If
haloscopes can measure the axion signal with high-enough frequency resolution,
then these streams are revealed in the form of an intrinsically spiky
lineshape, in stark contrast with the standard assumption of a smooth,
featureless Maxwellian distribution -- a unique prediction that constitutes a
way for experiments to distinguish between pre and post-inflationary axion
cosmologies.
