Flash sheet of tattoo designs with script lettering reading Stay Strong, let go and faith, plus a cross, lips, a feather, a heart and small birds.

Flash sheet of script quotes and small motifs

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

A flash sheet arranged with many separate tattoo designs on a white background. The main elements are bold script reading Stay Strong, smaller lettering such as let god, let go, faith and peace, a cross, a pair of lips, a Roman numeral III, a heart and a group of small birds. Most linework is black, with one teal feather adding colour.

Lettering Script Lettering Stay strong Faith Peace Cross Lip Feather Heart Bird Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ice had crept into the paddles again, so Nell spent the first hour of the morning on her knees at the lock with a boathook and a kettle of hot water, chipping at the iron while her father swore at the gate from the towpath. Starlings lifted off the willows in ragged strings and settled again on the wire. Above the wheelhouse door, where the paint had lifted, her mother's old feather was still wedged behind the sun visor, teal once and now the colour of pond weed, shivering every time the boat knocked the bank.

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Her father had never been a talker. He chalked 'let go' on the lock board the day her mother was buried, then rubbed it out again because the lock keeper's wife said it looked like a warning. 'Hold what holds you,' he'd say, 'and mind the rest.' Nell had never understood which was which. Three summers ago she had tied the Patience to the same rotten bollard at Coldharbour and told herself she would stay until the water went down, and the water had never gone down at all.

That morning the gate finally groaned open and the cut ran clear. Her father waved her through without looking up from his tea. She stood on the roof with the line coiled in her hands, the old knot still stiff with river rain, and found she could not move. Then the birds came up off the reeds all at once, a small black cloud turning above the towpath, and she knew the moment had arrived.

She cut the line with her knife. The boat slid forward a foot, then a yard, and the current took her, and nobody shouted after her. At the bend she looked back. Her father had raised his cup. Caught in the sun visor, the feather lifted free, spun once above the water and went ahead of her down the cut, the only bright thing on the grey river.