Close-up of a small black fine line tattoo of a bird perched on a leafy branch on the ankle, with bare feet resting on white bedding.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bird on a branch on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a songbird perched on a thin branch with a few leaves sits on the side of the ankle. The linework is delicate and fine, with minimal solid shading and no colour. The bare foot is raised against white bedding, with the tattoo placed in the upper part of the frame.

Fine line Ankle Bird Branch Leaves Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry has already gone when you reach the slipway, so you sit on an upturned creel and wait for the gulls to settle before you decide whether to walk the cliff road or wade the Sound at low water. Nobody on Scarrow has waded it and lived to boast of it, Morag says, though she says that about most things, and you have long since stopped trusting the sea to be as dramatic as her stories.

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The bird arrives while you are counting the moored boats. It is a small grey songbird with a thread of white at the throat, and it lands on the fence post beside you as if the post had been waiting for it. You know it is not the bird from last spring, because the island keeps only one of its kind at a time and the headland hawthorn stays bare until the next one comes. You whistle the three notes your mother taught you, and it answers with two, the way it always does, then drops to the path and waits.

You follow it up the cliff road, past the chapel with its cracked bell and the field of sheep that all look like your uncle. At the hawthorn it hops onto a thin branch with a few leaves still clinging to it and turns its head towards you. The letter from your brother has been in your coat pocket for nine days, soft at the folds from being read too often. You tuck it into the crook of the branch, under the leaves, and the bird takes it without a sound, a grey dot lifting over the water towards the mainland lights.

By the time you reach the slipway the ferry is coming back round the point, its horn low and patient. Morag is waving from the rail with both arms. You wave back, and for the first time in nine days you do not count the boats.