Small solid black silhouette of a soaring bird on the inner wrist of an open palm, with a plain pale background.

Soaring bird silhouette on the inner wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small solid black silhouette of a bird in flight sits on the inner wrist, with its wings spread and tail fanned out. The shape is filled with flat black ink and has feathered edges, with no visible shading or fine detail. The hand is open, palm up, against a plain, pale, softly lit background.

Forearm Bird Eagle Silhouette Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the rail, you lot, and stop fidgeting with that biscuit tin. Right. The winter we limped into Valparaiso with the foremast sprung, there was a boy aboard called Tomas Reddy, no kin of anybody's, who'd signed on at Falmouth with a tin of his mother's ginger nuts and not one word of English that the bosun would admit to. He spent his nights at the taffrail counting the albatrosses, and by the third week the old cook had given him a name for it, which I won't repeat in front of the ladies.

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The skipper kept a bird book in the chart room, all cracked leather and wine rings, and when the boy asked to borrow it he was told he could look at the pictures and not get ink on them. So he sat on a coil of manila with his finger under a page of raptors and drew, very small, on the back of an invoice, a bird with its wings held flat like a plank, dropping off a thermal above some mountain he'd never seen. He showed it to nobody but me, because I was the only one who'd sit still long enough to be shown anything.

He came back from Chile with a lung full of wet smoke and a pair of shore-going boots he could not afford. What he did with the invoice, I never knew. Forty years on, a man came into my shop in Bristol with his wrist held out like a stranger's, asking for that same bird, black as a hole in the sea, no fuss about the feathers. I asked him where he'd got the drawing. He said his grandfather had left it to him in a biscuit tin. I told him to hold still, and I did not tell him that I'd known the lad, nor that the tin had still been full of ginger nuts when I last saw it.