Fine line tattoo of a small bird in flight with a thin trailing line leading to the word Believe in script, on the inner wrist.

Bird and Believe script on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black silhouette of a bird sits at the left, with a single thin line curving across the inner wrist to the cursive word Believe on the right. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black on pale skin. The tattoo is centred horizontally on the wrist, with the fingers and fist filling the upper part of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Bird Script Word Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The grey hen came home on Tuesday, two days after the storm took the telegraph poles down along the Kelso road. Dad said she would never manage it. He had her in the basket already, ready to post to the harbour office with the tide tables, when she came over the wall with one wing trailing and sat on the coal shed roof as if nothing had happened. Mum cried, which she pretends she did not.

I have been thinking about what you said in your last letter, that the sea makes a man count his days in watches and not in anything that matters. I know the bird is only a bird. But she did not know the wires were gone. She just kept the line in her head, the way you keep the shape of a road you have walked once, and she followed it anyway, pole by pole, even where there were no poles at all.

Dad has tied a strip of red ribbon round her leg and says she will fly to Portsmouth next spring if you want her to. I told him she would do it for you. He said that was daft, and then he went out to the shed and came back with the little brass ring he keeps for the best birds, and asked me to write it on the back of this letter so you would know it was from him too.

Mind yourself. Write when you are ashore. The hen is called Believe, for reasons I will explain when you are home.

Love, Nell