Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three birds in flight on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small tattoo on the ankle showing three simple black bird silhouettes in flight, arranged in a diagonal line that moves up the skin. The lines are thin and the birds are solid black with no shading, set against a warm, slightly soft-focus background. The ankle sits above a brown canvas high-top trainer with white laces, which fills the lower half of the frame.

Fine line Ankle Bird Flying bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dessie had the galley hatch propped open with a bucket of potatoes when the first gull came down the wind, skidding sideways as if someone had flung it. I was scraping burnt porridge out of the big pan and didn't look up. You don't, on the Margaret Rae. Gulls take the crusts off the rail and the bread off the cooling rack, and they are a nuisance, nothing more.

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Dessie didn't go back to his peelings. Three weeks out of Fraserburgh with a face like wet paper, he stood in the hatch with a spoon in his fist and watched them climb. Three of them, one behind the other, cutting a diagonal up the grey sky as though they were following a line only they could see. They went north-east, straight into the cloud bank where the chart said nothing at all.

'They're going home,' he said. 'Look at them. Not one of them's looking at the sea.' I told him gulls go where the fish go and that was all there was to it. He didn't argue. He just wiped his hands on his apron, fetched the pencil from behind the tea caddy, and when the watch changed he drew three small birds on the back of a meal ticket and pinned it above the stove.

We made Fraserburgh eleven days later, and nobody mentioned the birds again. Dessie still has the ticket, I think, though it's gone soft with grease and the pencil has nearly faded. Every morning when I light the burner I see it there above the kettle, three marks climbing the wall towards the light.