Small black fine line script reading Cui Cui on a person's hip, with floral underwear visible at the edge of the frame.

Cui Cui script on a hip

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A person lies on their side on a light bed, showing the hip and upper thigh. A small black script word, Cui Cui, sits on the side of the hip. The lettering is thin and slightly slanted, with soft grey shading, and the photograph is muted in tone with a shallow background.

Lettering Fine line Other Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at Harrowgate Keep could agree what the bird was called, so we settled on the sound it made. Every morning it perched on the broken lip of the chapel window and chattered down at the sheep, quick and fussy, cui cui, cui cui, as if it had mislaid something and wanted it back by dinner. My brother said it was a wren. Old Mr Pell swore it was a monk's soul. I simply carried the lunch pail up the north stair, because that was the only place the bird would let me near.

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The summer I turned twelve the mortar gave way beneath the window and the arch came down in a slow grey sigh. The council put up orange tape and a sign about danger, and I went under it anyway. The bird was waiting on a shelf of fallen stone, watching me with one black eye. It did not fly. It sang its two notes until I sat down beside it and ate my bread, and when I crumbled a piece of crust it took the crumb and hopped away into the nettles without a backward look.

I came back with a pencil and a sheet of my mother's writing paper and drew the window as it had been, the arch whole, a small brown bird on the sill. Underneath I wrote the sound in the slanted hand the nuns had taught me, cui cui, and tucked the paper into the crack where the mortar had been softest. Nobody ever found it, which is how I know it was meant for the bird and not for them.

Forty years on I drive past the keep on the way to my daughter's, and the window is still a ragged mouth. There are wrens in it again, though. When the wind drops I can hear them calling across the field, the same two notes, as if they have been asked after something and decided to keep answering.