Pencil sketch of the word Ohana in cursive lettering with three simple bird shapes above and beside it, shown as a flash design on paper.

Ohana script with three birds

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on pale paper showing the word Ohana in a loose cursive script, with a larger looped capital O. Three simple, stylised birds in flight sit to the upper right and below the lettering. The linework is grey and shaded lightly, and the design is centred with open space around it.

Lettering Ohana Script Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shuffle closer, all of you, because the fire doesn't reach past the palms. Now. Who here has ever been lost in the dark on the water? No hands? Good, then you'll listen. Three boats went out past the reef at Mokuhale the night the wind turned, and only two of them had a lamp lit.

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Aunty Lehua stood on the black rocks with a torch made from an oiled rag, and she would not go in. Her husband was in the third boat. Her brother was in the second. Her nephew, twelve years old and begging to go, was in the first, rowing badly and proud of it. The men on the beach told her the sea had them now and to go home to bed. She answered with the word they all knew, the one that means nobody is left behind, and she kept saying it until the men were ashamed to keep saying the other thing.

Out past the reef, the frigate birds came down low over the water. Three of them, which is an odd number for birds, flying in a wide circle and then turning, always turning towards the land. The boys in the first boat followed them. The men in the second followed the boys. By the time the sky went grey, the three birds had brought every boat home to the sand, and the last one in was the nephew, shouting that he had been right all along.

Lehua counted heads on the beach the way you count eggs in a nest. Four. Five. Seven. At the end she started again, because the sea likes a second count, and this time it came out the same. So she went home and built the fire up, and that is why, when you hear the word ohana, you count the people beside you first. Off to bed now. Mind the crabs.