Black and grey script tattoo reading Stay Strong with a shaded feather across the top of a shoulder near the collarbone.

Stay Strong script with feather on shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads Stay Strong in a flowing black script, with a shaded feather sweeping beneath and behind the lettering. The linework is clean, and the feather uses soft grey shading for depth. The skin fills most of the frame, with the tattoo placed diagonally across the top of the shoulder near the collarbone.

Lettering Shoulder Script Feather Stay strong Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pigeon came up the shaft in Dad's dinner tin, its feet bound with thread and its breast still cold from the lamp room. I was nine that winter and the only one small enough to reach into the cage at the top. Mam held the lid while I pulled out the strip of paper, and she read it twice before she sat down on the step.

Keep reading

It was Dad's hand, all loops and no hurry, the way he wrote when he wanted us to know he was not frightened. Roof's sound on the east side. Water at the gate. Tell Nell to stay strong and mind the goat. Nell was sixteen and had been crying since the whistle went, and she read it over my shoulder and laughed in a broken way that made Mam laugh too.

The bird went back down the next morning with a reply tied on, and it came up again at dusk with the wind still in its wings, but it had lost one feather, a long grey flight feather that drifted off past the chapel wall. I ran after it and put it in the tin with the paper. Nell said the feather had no say in anything and I should stop being daft about it, but she kept looking at the tin all the same.

Dad walked up the hill three days later with his cap in his hand and coal in every crease of his face. I held the tin out to him without a word. He read the paper, then smiled and said he had been strong all along, which was the only thing he had ever needed to write down.