Black script lettering reading Don't be Delicate, Be Vast and Brilliant, with small flying birds trailing across a forearm, in lettering style.

Script quote with birds on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a black script quote, "Don't be Delicate / Be Vast and Brilliant", running diagonally across the inner forearm. A small flock of bird silhouettes rises from the lower left, with two more birds set near the end of the lines. The linework is solid and even, with no shading, and the photograph is taken straight on against a wooden surface.

Lettering Forearm Script text Quote Bird Flock Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the bread came out of the oven this morning looking like a dropped hat, and Cook Mackie told me to eat the evidence before the bosun saw it. I ate it. I am writing this on the back of the spice manifest because the galley table is the only flat thing aboard that doesn't rock, and even that has a bad habit of sliding toward the stove when we roll.

Keep reading

There is a line of chalk above the range that Mackie rewrites every voyage. This time it reads Don't be delicate, be vast and brilliant, in his square capitals, and I asked him where a fishmonger's son got a sentence like that. He said it came off a tea chest from Ceylon, and he wasn't going to waste good chalk arguing. Since then I have stopped apologising to the potatoes. Yesterday I rolled pastry thin enough to read the newspaper through, and the second mate came down to see who had died.

Last evening a little flock of shearwaters came in off the swell and kept pace with the stern for an hour, dropping and lifting in our wake as if someone had flung a handful of pepper over the water. Mackie stood at the rail with his pipe gone out and said they never look back at the ship. They just go wherever the wind is thickest. I did not know what to say to that, so I went below and made a custard so large it needed two spoons and a prayer.

Tell Father I am well fed and not at all sorry. I will write again from Madeira, if the post goes ashore before the cook quarrels with the captain again. Your loving sister, Ada.