Black and grey dove with outstretched wings carrying an olive branch, with the script words Fearfully and wonderfully made beneath it.

Dove with olive branch and script

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

A dove with wings spread wide holds an olive branch in its beak, with curling flourishes trailing from its tail. Beneath it, the phrase Fearfully & wonderfully made is written in flowing script. The work uses soft grey shading on the wings and body with darker linework for the feathers, all in black ink and greys.

Lettering Dove Bird Wing Script Lettering Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the lot of you, the urn's only just boiled. You'll want to hear this one because it's about Dennis Tully and the summer he put a dead blackbird in Mrs Ormerod's satchel, and what came of it. Nobody in this hall has ever been as sorry about anything as Dennis was that week, and he never once said so.

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Dennis and Colin Harte were best friends until the Easter fair, when a goldfish went missing from the coconut stall and both of them swore on their mothers they hadn't touched it. For eleven months they didn't speak. They sat at opposite ends of the bus, they passed notes through other boys, and when the school entered them both for the cross-country run they crossed the finish line forty yards apart, each pretending the other was a lamppost.

Then in the November the beck flooded the lower field, and Colin went under the footbridge after a spaniel. Dennis was already in the water before anyone else reached the bank. Between them they got the dog out, and the boys came away with nothing worse than chilblains and scraped palms. The headmaster, who was not a man for speeches, pinned a card to the notice board that said only Fearfully & wonderfully made, with a small dove beneath it holding a twig in its beak.

Colin never told anyone what Dennis said on the bank. I'll tell you now, because Dennis is dead and I'm old and it's the last thing I'll get to say. Dennis said, "Your mam will kill me," and Colin said, "She'll kill us both," and that was the whole of their making up.