Small black line tattoo of a stylised wing on the side of an ankle, above a black sock.

Stylised wing on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a person's ankle and lower leg, with the top of a black sock visible at the bottom edge. The tattoo is a single simple black outline of a stylised wing or swoosh shape, with a curved stroke and a few smaller strokes forming feathers. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour, set against pale skin on a light textured background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

Keep reading

The Harriet Lowe came into Lerwick on Tuesday with her foremast gone and the bosun's cough worse, and Captain Pardoe has docked her for a month. I have been given the job of scraping the old figurehead down to bare oak before the yard men take it for firewood. You will laugh, but it is a wing. Not a bird, not a woman, just one long curl of carved wood that sweeps off the bow like a gull turning into the wind. Someone cut it in a hurry. The feathers are three strokes each, and the paint is gone except for a little blue in the grooves.

I sat on the slip with a chisel for two hours trying to decide whether to keep the line or square it off into a plain bracket. In the end I kept it. The sea was flat and grey past the breakwater, and every time I lifted my head the carving seemed to have shifted, as if it were still deciding which way to go.

The old mate told me the wing was cut by a man called Tobias Keel, who never sailed a day in her, but whose wife was lost off the Cape the winter before. He wanted something ahead of the bow that could not be pulled under. I do not know if that is true. Sailors tell stories the way they tie knots, to keep their hands busy.

I am sending you the last curl I cut away, wrapped in the brown paper from the chandler's. Put it on the windowsill where the morning light comes in. It is not much, but it is the right shape for the wind.

Love, Tom

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