Black silhouette of a Canada goose on off-white paper, with white script reading You Silly Goose and swirling ornaments across its body.

Canada goose with You Silly Goose lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a Canada goose stands in profile, its neck raised and its head turned to the left. The words You Silly Goose are cut out in white script across the body, with decorative swirls and a scalloped pattern on the wing and tail. The design is flat black and white on an off-white background, with no shading or colour.

Lettering Bird Lettering Script Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the far side of the mudflats, where the tide came in faster than a man could walk, lived a goose called Marrow who had never once been told she was wise. Her neighbours on Hobb's Island said she honked at the wrong hour and waddled into the reeds whenever a boat was coming. The ferryman's boy shouted it across the water every morning: you silly goose. She took it as a name, because nothing else was offered.

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One autumn the fog sat on the island for nine days, and the boy's father went out after the last lamb and did not come back. The islanders lit their lanterns and called into the grey, and the sound went out and came back to them as nothing. Marrow stood at the water's edge with her neck stretched long and her head turned sideways, listening the way geese do, and when the others were pointing at the wrong end of the shore she set off along the mud, slow and sure, stopping every few yards to call and wait.

She found him on a sandbar with his boot stuck fast, one hand holding the rope she had been following. The boy ran the whole way down the causeway with the rest of them behind him. When they got the father to the fire, wrapped in three coats and swearing softly at the cold, he looked at the goose sitting on the stones beside him and said, you silly bird, you came for me. Marrow hissed once, politely, and went to find her supper.