Small feather tattoo on the thigh

What was tangled in it was a gull's feather, long as a man's forearm, grey at the edges and dark toward the tip, caught in the mesh with a snarl of blue twine. Tamsin freed it and held it up to the light. The barbs were so fine you could see the harbour wall through them, and the quill ran thin as a hair until it curled at the base, like a question nobody had bothered to finish. Eli, who was nine and thought himself a man, said it was a bad sign. Tamsin said a feather is only a feather until somebody decides what it means.

So they wrapped it in oilcloth and carried it up the hill to the widow Pell, whose husband had gone out on the Mary Lowe and never come back. Mrs Pell turned it over for a long while, then tucked it inside her Bible at the place where the psalms begin. Nobody ever asked her what she had decided it meant.

By spring the net was mended, the boats were going out again, and Eli was going with them. On his first morning out he watched a gull dip low over the water, then rise with something silver in its beak, and he laughed so loudly the skipper cuffed him. Tamsin, watching from the quay, said nothing at all, which for Tamsin was the same as saying I told you so.