Red and black tattoo of a cardinal in flight with spread wings and a long tail, on the inner forearm of a person wearing a white shirt.

Red cardinal in flight on forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A cardinal bird is shown mid-flight, with one wing raised high and the other angled down, and its tail feathers fanning out at the bottom. The feathers and outlines are drawn in bold black lines, while the body and wings are filled with loose, translucent red wash that fades at the edges. The design sits against plain skin on a forearm, with a red wall behind it.

Forearm Bird Wing Feather Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gil Harrowby had counted forty-one days out of Norfolk when the bird came aboard, a red thing the size of a fist, battered against the forward rigging of the Marisol Kent as if the wind had flung it there and forgotten it. The second mate wanted it over the side. Gil set a tin lid of crushed biscuit on the hatch cover and kept his distance.

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It stayed three days. It ate biscuit, then ship's oatmeal, and on the fourth morning it perched on the brass rail of the wheelhouse and sang a single bright run of notes that nobody on the bridge had heard before. The cook called it a sign. Gil called it a bird that had lost its bearings, which he understood better than most. He had sailed from Hull with his wife's letter folded in his oilskin and a promise to be home before the spring tides, and the sea had cared nothing for either.

On the fifth night the wind backed round and the bird went up. Gil watched it climb through the lamplight, wings wide, its tail spread like a fan of cut paper, until it was a smudge of colour against the black and then nothing at all. He told himself it had smelled land. He did not believe it, and he suspected the bird did not either.

When the Marisol Kent came into Hull in April, the quay was wet and grey and the gulls were fighting over a split crate of herring. Gil stepped down the gangway and found a single red feather stuck to the sole of his boot, long as his palm and still soft at the tip. He tucked it inside the letter he had been carrying home for three months, so that it would be the first thing his wife saw when she opened it.