Black blackletter-style lettering reading Expecto Patronum with pink and blue watercolour splashes behind it, tattooed on a lower leg above a grey canvas trainer.

Expecto Patronum lettering on a calf

Lettering · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo reads Expecto Patronum with an exclamation mark, set in bold, angular blackletter-style letters with ragged edges. Pink and pale blue watercolour washes sit behind the words, with small ink specks scattered around the edges. The photo is taken close up at a slight angle, with the lettering centred on a lower leg and a grey trainer visible at the bottom left.

Lettering Calf Quote Lettering Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming sideways for three hours when Marta finally let go of the rail and shouted at the sea. Nobody on the Caldera Star had heard the old charm spoken aloud, least of all by the second mate's apprentice, who had learned it from a battered paperback left in the crew mess in Rotterdam, its spine mended with brown tape. Her boots slid on the wet deck. The bridge windows glowed amber above her, and the wheelhouse door stayed shut.

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"Expecto Patronum!" she called again, louder, because the first time the wind had taken it. Behind her Dunmore, the cook, laughed from the galley doorway with a mug in each hand. Then a wave came over the bow, grey and heavy, and when it sluiced off the scuppers there was light caught in the foam. Pale blue, then a bruised pink where the sunset would have been, it gathered itself into the shape of a heron. Its wings ran straight into the spray and its legs were the colour of wet slate.

It settled on the bow rail as if it had been waiting there all voyage. The ship lurched and steadied, though nothing Marta had done should have worked. Dunmore put his mugs down on a bollard. The heron turned its head toward the bridge, then toward the black water to the north, and lifted off without a sound. Marta followed it with her hand on the rail. Through a gap in the swell she saw a light low on the horizon, a headland the chart insisted was forty miles away.

By dawn the sea had gone flat and the sky was clean. The heron was gone, but a single feather lay on the bow rail, dark and fine as a stroke of pen, and it did not blow away when the wind came back.