Black ink tattoo of a shaded feather with birds lifting away and a handwritten quote in script, across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Feather and quote on a shoulder blade

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black feather runs diagonally across the upper back, with a flock of small birds lifting away from its tip. The script quote reads 'You've been given this life because you are strong enough to handle it', set in a flowing hand that follows the curve of the shoulder. The image is in black and grey with soft shading on the feather and crisp, dark lettering against the skin.

Lettering Shoulder Back Feather Bird Script Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The band packed up an hour early tonight, so I have had the whole of the Palais to myself with a mop and too much time to think. Your Saturday shoes are still under the cloakroom bench where you left them. I have not moved them. Mr Pryce says I am sentimental, and he may be right, but a girl who walks out of a hall at midnight with one heel broken deserves to find her things where she left them.

You asked me in your last letter whether you were mad to take the Leeds post. I did not answer properly, so here is the answer. Your mother stood in that same doorway in 1938 with a cardboard case and no money, and she was frightened every single day for a year. She did not come back because she was brave. She came back because she had decided to stay frightened and carry on, which is most of what bravery is in my experience. You have that in you. I watched you cross the floor the night you got the letter, all elbows and nerve, and I thought, there she goes.

The starlings have been gathering over the car park all week, hundreds of them, lifting and turning like one thing. Last night they came down on the wires and then rose again without any sign of why. I stood outside with my tea and thought of your blue feather pen, the one you kept losing down the back of the piano.

Write when you are settled. Tell me the new hall has a proper sprung floor and that the men there cannot dance. Your Auntie Vi sends love and says to eat something green.

Love, Aunt Win