Black bird silhouette with quote lettering
Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo
A solid black bird silhouette in mid-flight with dark splatter dots sits across the skin, with two speech bubbles and a rectangular caption box containing lettered text. The shapes are filled in solid black with clean, sharp edges, and the lettering is crisp and legible. The design is black ink only and is centred on the arm with plain skin around it.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The gannet came off the cliff at Skerrow in the wrong wind, folding its wings too late, and it hit the slipway like a dropped sack. Mairi Gunn said it was finished. I knelt beside it anyway, because I was nine and had not yet learned which things are finished.
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Nobody on Skerrow talked about the dead in daylight. My grandfather kept a tin of tobacco for the ferryman who never came back from the Sound in 1961, and he said the sea kept its own books. You went down on the rocks and either you got up or the water kept your name. I had heard it so often it sounded like a prayer with the words in the wrong order.
The gannet lifted its head. One eye, black as a wet slate, found me. Then it pushed off the stones with its feet, half ran and half fell over the edge of the slip, and for one stupid heartbeat it simply dropped. I thought I had been lied to. Then the wings caught the updraught off the cliff and it rose past my face, so close I smelled fish and salt, and banked away over the lighthouse.
Mairi was wrong and never once admitted it. She went back up the brae with her creel, saying nothing, and I understood that falling was only the first half of the story. The sea keeps its books, but it does not always write the ending first.
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