Two photos of a fine line script tattoo reading Perfectly Imperfect, one with a small red balloon and one with a shaded feather and birds, on skin.

Perfectly Imperfect script with balloon or feather

Lettering · Mixed · Photo

The top photo shows the words Perfectly Imperfect in thin black script with a small red balloon tied to the end of the line. The bottom photo shows the same wording in black script above a shaded black and grey feather with small birds rising from its top edge. Both are close-up photographs on plain skin with the tattoos centred in the frame.

Lettering Fine line Script Balloon Feather Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Harbour Lost Property office believed the boy had kept a feather in his coat for three years, so Ada Pring stopped arguing and put the kettle on instead. She had run the counter for thirty-one years, long enough to know that people rarely lost the thing they came in asking about. They lost the words they had tied to it.

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Callum came in every Thursday in October with the same question. Had anyone handed in a red balloon? A red balloon with a length of silver ribbon and a card knotted to the end, the card written in his grandad's square capitals: PERFECTLY IMPERFECT, WHICH IS WHY WE WORK. Grandad had said it at every bad haircut and burnt tea of Callum's childhood. On the Sunday before the cliff railway closed for winter, the boy had let the balloon go from the end of the pier and watched it climb until it was a red full stop over the bay.

Ada did not tell him that balloons went up and then went everywhere. She told him to come back the following week, and she meant it, because the gulls along that stretch of Dunmere were fond of string and she had seen stranger things come in off the sea.

On the Thursday after the storm, a fisherman brought in a crate of odds and ends. Tangled in its mesh was the ribbon, the card gone to pulp but the capitals still legible under the salt. Pinned beneath it by a wet clothes peg was a grey-brown feather as long as Ada's forearm. She sat with it a while, listening to the kettle tick as it cooled. Then she wrapped both in brown paper, wrote Callum on the front, and set the parcel in the window where the morning light could find it.