Black and grey tattoo of a bird with a raised wing beside the words books and cleverness in serif lettering, shown on skin.

Bird and books and cleverness lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink outline of a bird with a raised, hatched wing and a hooked beak, with its talons visible at the lower edge. To the right, the words books and cleverness are set in a lowercase serif typeface, with the lines stacked in two rows. The image is greyscale, with bold, even linework and no shading across the piece.

Lettering Bird Wing Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hatch on the mobile library stuck every Tuesday outside the Co-op in Wrenmere, and you were the one who had to shoulder it open, because Mr Haskett said his hands were for stamping and not for lifting. Behind the counter the ledger smelled of damp paper and the tin of pear drops nobody was allowed to touch. Someone had painted a hawk on the van's door in green and gold, its hooked beak turned toward the queue as if it were waiting to be served.

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Young Tom Ellery came up the step each week with his satchel full of returns and asked for anything on falconry. He read the same page of the same book so often the spine cracked open at it. You told him birds were only clever in the way they waited. He laughed and said cleverness was a thing you could carry about in your head like a stone in a pocket, and he showed you a sketch he had made of a hawk with its wing raised, the feathers hatched like cross-stitch, with words beneath in capitals that were nearly straight.

In March the van did not come. The hatch was found open and the hawk was gone from the door, leaving a pale rectangle where the paint had been shielded from the weather. Tom's mother brought his satchel in, full of books he had never returned, and tucked inside the last one was a note in pencil: Tell the bird I have the cleverness now.

You stamped the ledger for the last time that week, and the date sat crooked on the page, as if the ink had been in a hurry to get somewhere else.