Woman seen from behind with arms raised, showing a green wing tattoo on her left upper back and a red star with chevrons on her right upper back.

Green wing and red star on upper back

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A woman seen from behind with both arms raised and her hands in her hair, wearing a black racerback vest top. A simple green wing shape sits on the left side of her upper back near the shoulder blade, and a red five-point star with three chevrons sits on the right side. A darker script tattoo is also partly visible on her right forearm at the top of the frame.

Back Forearm Wing Star Chevron Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pallister kept Gull House at the bottom of Harbour Row, and every October a lodger in the back attic came down to breakfast asking the same question about the wind over the bay. She never answered it straight. She would pour the tea, tap the brown pot twice with her thumb, and say the wind was coming round to the north-west, which was what her mother had said, and her mother's mother before that.

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The lodger that year was a quiet man called Tobias Vane who had carried messages for the signal corps in the last war and kept a red star pinned inside his cap. He painted small things for the shop windows: a green wing for the chandler, a gull for the fishmonger's sign. One morning he found an old tin box under the stairs, three chevrons scratched into its lid, and he sat on the bottom step with it open on his knees until the kettle boiled dry.

Inside were forty-one letters, none of them stamped. Each had been written to a boy on a minesweeper who never came home, and each was signed with a wing drawn in pencil in the corner. Mrs Pallister came out with a dish cloth and said nothing. She only took the box down to the harbour wall and let the north-westerly lift the lids off the envelopes one by one, until the water inside the wall was white with paper.

Tobias painted a new green wing on the front door that week, and the gulls came down to sit on it. By Christmas the door had been repainted twice, and nobody on Harbour Row asked him why.