Black ink script lettering reading it goes on, with a small bird, on the side of a finger in lettering style.

Script lettering and bird on a finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand resting on a wooden table, holding a lit cigarette between the fingers. A black script phrase reading it goes on runs across the middle finger, with a small solid bird silhouette beside it. The soft, slightly filtered lighting and shallow focus keep the background muted and the tattoo as the main point of interest.

Lettering Hand Script Text Bird Finger Cigarette Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been coming sideways off the canvas roofs of Harbour Market since six, and by ten the gutters ran like a second river under our trestles. Dad never shut for weather. He reckoned the gulls didn't either, and he'd point up at the one that sat on the scaffold pole above our pitch, grey and unbothered, waiting for offcuts. 'Whatever comes down, it goes on,' he'd say, then go back to scaling mackerel with his cracked thumbnail.

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The winter the council moved half the traders to the new hall, Dad kept our pitch by the fish quay. Takings dropped to nothing some weeks. When the rain got into the cash tin, he wrapped the notes in a carrier bag and kept gutting. Customers asked if we were packing up. He'd tip his cap at the pole and say the bird hadn't handed him any notice, so neither had he.

One Saturday in March the pole was bare. The gull had gone, and the wind had turned our awning inside out. I stood holding a box of cod with water running down my collar, certain this was the end of it. Dad didn't look worried. He wiped his hands on his apron, studied the empty pole for a long moment, then tipped his head back to the sky.

High over the car park, a grey shape was wheeling into the wind, dropping and catching itself and climbing again. Dad lifted the tin from under the trestle, counted out change for the next customer, and said, as if it had been his idea all along, 'There he is.'