Black ink tattoo on a shoulder blade showing a feather dissolving into flying birds, with script reading Always on my mind Forever in my heart.

Feather and birds with script on shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink feather on the left dissolves into a flock of small birds rising towards the upper right. Three lines of cursive script, reading Always on my mind Forever in my heart, sit beside the feather and are set in a flowing hand. The shading is solid black with fine detail in the feather barbs, and the composition follows the diagonal of the birds across the back of the shoulder.

Lettering Shoulder Feather Bird Script Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pryce kept the rooms at Gull Rest the way she kept her hymn book, with the spine cracked and the corners soft. By October the lodgers had thinned to a retired organist in the attic and a man who sold insurance by post, and you were the only one who carried the coal up without being asked. Nobody had told you the sea would take a whole week to come back in after a storm, so you spent those days on the sea wall with a cup of tea going cold in your hand.

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On the Thursday a girl came off the coach with one suitcase and a tin of sewing needles, and she asked for the room at the top of the stairs, the one with the window that faced the harbour. She paid in coins she had counted twice. She did not come down for supper. You took her a tray and found her at the sill, sorting through a bag of loose feathers she had gathered off the rocks, grey and brown and one dark-tipped as a jackdaw's, and she held the best one up to the light so you could see the barbs separate like the teeth of a comb.

She said her brother used to write her letters on the back of shipping forms, always ending the same way, and she could not remember whether he had meant the sea or the street. You told her the feather had come off a shag, which you knew because you had watched the bird drop it that morning. She laughed, and then she did not, and the gulls went up off the wall all at once in a rush of wings that turned the window pale.

In the morning the room was empty and the bed made tight. On the sill lay one feather, dark and whole, and beside it a single line in pencil on the back of a coach ticket: he will find the bird before he finds the shore. You put the ticket in your apron pocket and went down to light the range.