Colour tattoo of a cockatiel with a yellow crest and orange cheek patch, with the word Charlie in script beneath it, on skin.

Cockatiel with the name Charlie

Realism · Mixed · Photo

A cockatiel perches side on, facing left, with a raised yellow crest, a pale grey body, grey wing feathers and an orange cheek patch. The bird is drawn with soft shading and fine detail in the eye, beak and feet. The word Charlie is written in black cursive script below the bird's tail, and the design sits on a pale, lightly freckled area of skin within a vignetted frame.

Realism Lettering Bird Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls had been squabbling over fish heads since first light when the grey bird with the yellow crest came hopping along the harbour wall, calling a name nobody in Porthmellan had given it. Old Mags Penhale swore it was the same bird that had lived in the lamp room at the end of the pier, learning to whistle the tide times for the harbourmaster's boy.

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The boy was Charlie Veale, and the winter he was eleven he went out with his uncle on the Gull's Pride. By noon the sky had turned the colour of slate. The bird, which had never once left the lamp room, flew down to the quay rail and shrieked until the women came out with their lanterns. Nobody thought much of it. Then a bell rang from beyond the bar, faint and wrong, and the uncle's voice came over the water.

They say the boat came through the gap at the turn of the tide with the boy lashed to the mast and his hands raw from the rope, and that the bird rode on the bow the whole way in, never once looking away from him. Nobody could say how it knew which way the channel ran in the dark.

The harbour never fed the gulls again after that. Every evening Mags scatters a pinch of millet on the lamp room step. The bird comes for it, bobs its crest, and says Charlie in a voice like a rusty hinge, and the lads on the boats touch their caps as they pass.