Black script reading not all those who wander are lost runs down the inner side of a foot, beside a whale tail and a small bird in a fine line style.

Quote with whale tail and bird on a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a foot with a black script quote running from the ankle towards the toes. A whale tail and a small bird silhouette sit alongside the lettering. The ink is a dark grey-black, with thin, even linework in the script and solid fills in the silhouettes.

Lettering Other Whale Bird Quote Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the old gardener at Harrowgate Hall walked down to the sea wall with a spade over one shoulder and came back with something he would not explain. This year it was a bird, a small dark swift with its wings folded like a closed fan, which he laid on the potting bench as though it might still be warm. Marjorie, the cook's girl, asked him where he had found it. He said the bird had been blown in off the water, and that a whale had been waiting out past the breakwater, lifting its tail above the swell as if to point.

Keep reading

He had been a sailor once, before the garden. Forty years earlier he had shipped out on a whaler and come home with no money and a habit of staring at horizons. The village said he had wandered too far. He said the sea had simply kept his name and given him back a better one. Nobody argued with a man who grew cabbages like that.

Marjorie wanted to know what the whale had wanted. He thought about it while he pinched out tomato shoots. "Nothing. It was only going down, the way they do, and it trusted the water to bring it back up." He pressed a seed packet into her palm, a pale blue one with no name printed on it. "Plant that by the wall. Whatever comes up will know the way home better than you do."

The next morning the wall was bright with a row of thin green stems, and above them, on the coping stone, sat the swift, very much alive, its wings unfolded and turned towards the sea.