A wing made of musical staff lines and notes, with a red ribbon and the script words Fly from the inside, tattooed on an upper arm.

Musical wing and script quote on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A wing formed from musical staff lines and notes spreads across the upper arm and shoulder, with a red ribbon wrapped through the feathers and green-grey shading along its lower edge. Beside it, black cursive script reads Fly from the inside, with clean, even linework. Most of the design is grey and black, with the red ribbon and green tones adding colour against the skin.

Lettering Upper arm Wing Music note Musical staff Ribbon Script text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Morag,

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The piano came over on the Tuesday boat, wrapped in three blankets and two sheets of tarpaulin, and it has sat in the chapel hall ever since with its lid propped open like a mouth waiting to be fed. I have tuned it twice now. The damp off the sea has pulled the middle octave flat, and the bass strings sing a note I can't get rid of. Mrs Gilchrist says the old minister used to play hymns on it during storms so the men on the rocks could hear something that wasn't wind.

Yesterday I found the sheet music in the piano stool, pages gone brown at the corners, copied out by hand. Someone had written the staves in pencil, and the notes climbed the page like starlings on a wire. At the bottom, in ink, a single line: fly from the inside. I asked Mrs Gilchrist what it meant. She shrugged and said the island makes everyone sing something they can't say out loud, and then she asked whether I wanted tea or not.

I played the thing through last night with the window open. The wind carried half of it out over the water, and a dozen gulls came down onto the harbour wall to listen, which I did not expect. When I finished, the room was quiet, and the lamp at the point swung round once, then twice, and I thought of you on the mainland, counting the ferries in and out.

Come out at the end of the month. Bring the good scissors and the tuning fork you borrowed in 1998 and never returned. I will keep the lid up until you arrive.

Love, Iain