Black ink script reading Breathe with three small birds in flight, tattooed on the inner wrist and forearm, in a lettering style.

Breathe script with three birds on wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the word Breathe written in flowing black script across the inner wrist, with three small bird silhouettes flying off the end of the lettering. The linework is solid and even, with the letters shaded in a dark, uniform black. The plain green background is softly out of focus, keeping attention on the tattoo.

Lettering Forearm Breathe Script Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kettle had boiled twice before Danny Roe came down the companionway grey as a gutted mackerel, and I put a mug in his hands without asking how the night had gone. He wrapped his fingers round it and kept his eyes on the porthole, where the swell lifted the horizon up and dropped it again like a dish being cleared.

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Four days out from Peterhead we'd lost the swell and found the wind, and the net had come up light for the third trip running. Danny had the wheelhouse watch and the skipper's temper to carry, and he carried neither well. I told him the old way on my nan's side of the family was to write a word on the back of your hand before a long haul. She'd done it for my granda, who fished the Buchan boats for forty years and came home every time. Breathe, she'd written, in blue biro. Danny thought it soppy.

Halfway through the second mug the gannets came. Three of them, cutting low across the bows and peeling off toward the cliffs, and Danny watched them until they were specks. Where are they off to, then? he said. Land, probably. Somewhere they can stop. He laughed, a proper laugh, the first since Tuesday, and rubbed his thumb hard across his palm as if the biro might still be there.

The skipper's voice came down the stairs asking for the tea, and Danny stood, drained the mug, and went up with his shoulders a little lower than they'd been. I washed the cups. Out of the port window the birds were gone and the sea was just the sea, but I found I'd taken a full breath, long and slow, and I let it out only when the kettle started again.