Script quote with small bird design
Lettering · Black and grey · Flash
A black ink drawing of a four line quote in flowing calligraphic script, with looped capitals and long swashes on the letters. A small solid black bird silhouette sits centred below the final line. The design is in black ink on a plain white background, with the text filling most of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Tobias Crane carried a fiddle aboard the brig Wren Lady in the spring the ice came early to the Baltic, and he was the only man on her who could make the ship's timbers hum back at him. The crew called the fiddle his second heart. Nobody thought it odd, for sailors will say anything about a thing that keeps them from going mad.
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On the forty-first day out, the wind dropped to nothing and the sea went flat as slate. Men sat on the hatch covers with dry tongues and nothing to say. Pim, the cook's boy, came up with a bowl of biscuit and found the fiddler playing a slow tune with his eyes shut. A small dark bird, no bigger than a thumb, had landed on the rail beside him and would not leave. Pim said it sat through the whole tune, then flew off towards the land they had left behind.
The men said the bird was a sign, and the captain said it was only a bird. Tobias said it had come to hear the second verse, which he had not finished. He never did finish it. He died in his bunk a fortnight later with the fiddle across his chest, and the bird was never seen again.
Pim kept the tune. He hummed it at every watch change for fifty years, and when he was an old man in a Yarmouth cottage and his grandchildren asked what kept a sailor steady, he tapped his chest twice and told them to listen for the thing that never stopped.
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