A small gold-coloured winged bird design on the upper arm of a woman in a long patterned dress, standing on stone steps.

Gold winged bird design on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman in a wide-brimmed hat and long patterned maxi dress stands on pale stone steps, her face turned downward and partly out of frame. A small winged bird design sits on her upper arm, rendered in a metallic gold tone that appears to be a temporary or metallic-finish design rather than black ink. The warm, soft lighting and angled composition keep the arm design modest in scale against the background.

Upper arm Wing Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gilder came aboard at Gravesend with a tin of leaf, a brush of squirrel hair and a bad cough, and the first thing he asked for was the lamp. The bird on our bow had been carved from elm by a man who had never seen a swallow, and it looked more like a hen that had lost an argument. Cook said it would sink us. Captain Pell said it would do until Madeira.

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He worked in the forecastle hatch for six days, laying leaf over size, breathing on it, lifting each sheet with the tip of a fingernail. The sea went flat and the wind died, and the watch gathered at the rail pretending they had work to do. He told me gold was a poor metal for a bird, too heavy, always wanting to fall, so he gave the wings more feathers than any gull would carry, each one cut to catch the light off the water.

Off the Canaries a squall tore the foresail and we ran before it for two nights. When the sky cleared the bird was still there, shining where the spray had struck it, and the mate swore it was the only thing on deck that had not been frightened. Pell ordered the name painted beneath it. The gilder had already gone ashore at Santa Cruz with his lamp and his cough, and nobody wrote down where.

I kept one spare leaf folded in my logbook. Some nights I still take it out and hold it to the lantern. It has never tarnished, and of all the things that man told me, that is the only one I have never had reason to doubt.