Black and grey fine line tattoos on an upper arm, including a crescent moon with a bird, a speech bubble reading CAN I LIVE, a palm tree over water and a small heart.

Small flash-style tattoos along an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of an arm covered in many small separate tattoos. The motifs include a crescent moon with a bird-like figure, a speech bubble with the words CAN I LIVE, a palm tree above wavy lines, a heart, a small ring and a few tiny outlined shapes. The linework is fine and mostly unshaded, with the designs scattered loosely across the skin.

Fine line Upper arm Moon Bird Speech bubble Palm tree Heart Water Ring Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of the drought, the palm on the Scarp had stopped bearing, and the court clerk, Ottery, was writing the king's decrees on the backs of old tide tables because the ink had run dry. Nobody else would climb down to the shore after dark, so the steward gave the job to you, a girl with salt in her boots and a satchel of bread, and sent you to ask the moon-bird what it wanted.

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The bird waited on the lowest wave-cut step, folded like a paper crescent, its beak hooked toward the water. When you came close, a cloud of breath rose from its throat and hung in the still air, and in that cloud the words formed in thin grey letters: CAN I LIVE? You had expected a demand, not a question. Behind you the lanterns of the upper town blinked out one by one, as they did every night now, because the kingdom had been burning its own light to keep the bird awake, and the bird had been feeding on it.

You took the ring from your pocket, the plain iron band the steward had dug from the mud of the old well, the one that had belonged to the king who first made the bird a promise. You held it out. The bird did not take it. It lifted one wing toward the palm on the headland and then toward the wavy lines of the tide, and you understood it was asking you to decide whether it should go on.

You slid the ring onto its crooked claw and said the only thing you had ever heard the old kings say at the water's edge: that the sea is owed its turn. The cloud of words broke apart. The tide drew back over the steps, leaving a long pale road of wet stone to the headland, and far up the Scarp one palm frond lifted, green again, into the dark.