Fine line tattoo of a flock of birds rising up the inner wrist and forearm, with the script words "with brave wings she flies" beneath them.

Flock of birds and script on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A flock of small birds in flight rises diagonally from the wrist towards the forearm, with the largest birds near the top and smaller ones clustered lower down. Below them, thin cursive script reads "with brave wings she flies" in a slanted line. The linework is fine and the ink is a single dark tone, with no shading or colour, and the image is shot close up on a plain light background.

Fine line Forearm Bird Flock Script Quote Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had counted the starlings three times before the lock keeper's boy shouted that the gate was ready, and by then the flock had lifted off the willows and turned over the towpath like a sheet shaken out. Her father did not look up. He was tying off the bow line to the bollard with the knot he had taught her, the one that came undone if you pulled the wrong end, and he said the water would be low past Hanbury and they would need to be through before noon.

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The barge was called the Marigold Rose and had been her mother's before her mother died, though nobody on the Severn cut said that aloud anymore. Nell kept the letters in a biscuit tin under the bench in the cabin. There were eleven of them, all in the same looping hand, all addressed to a Mrs Hannah Cole at a boatyard in Stourport, and the last one had come back stamped unknown. Nell had read it so often the folds had gone soft as cloth. It ended with a line she had copied onto the inside of the tin lid in pencil: with brave wings she flies.

They came through the lock at twenty past eleven. At the far gate the birds came down again onto the mudflats, dozens of them, sorting themselves into shapes that meant nothing she could read, and her father finally looked up and said, quite plainly, that her mother had always claimed the birds knew the water before the boats did. Nell took the tiller. She did not say that she had only been waiting for him to say something like that. She steered them out past the last moored hull, the starlings rose in one wide wheel and went north over the river, and she let the barge drift after them.