Flying silhouettes with Never Grow Up

Black and grey · Flash

The design shows four solid black silhouettes of figures in flight, decreasing in size from right to left across the upper part of the page. Below them, the words Never Grow Up are set in a thin, widely spaced typeface. The image is flat black on white with no shading or colour, and the figures and lettering are arranged in a loose diagonal.

Silhouette Flying figure Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now hush, the lot of you, and sit where the gulls can't steal your crusts. This is the story of the Harrow boys out of Skerrow Bay, and it starts the winter the fog came in so thick the boats had to feel their way home by the bell.

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Old Nan Harrow kept the count. Every dawn she stood on the breakwater with her shawl pulled tight and counted shadows coming in low over the water. There were four of them that year: Jem, Eli, the twins Ruth and Pim, and little Dorrie, who was no bigger than a crab pot and loud as a foghorn. They flew, mind, and you'll not believe me, but they flew the way gulls do when the wind is in a good mood, arms out, shirts flapping, not a care in their heads.

Here's the turn. Come spring, Jem's mother bought him a proper pair of boots for the mainland school, and that night he stood at the window and said he was too old for the bay. Eli laughed at him. Dorrie didn't laugh. She climbed up on the sill and told him that if he went, the sky would have a hole in it the shape of him. Jem stayed. The boots went under the bed and never came out.

And the count? Nan Harrow still counts four shadows at dawn, though the sea took Eli one February and never gave him back. Four children who never grew up, she says, and that's a fair bargain if you ask the gulls. So if you see a shadow crossing the breakwater in the fog, don't wave at it. Just hold your hat on, and let it go by.