Black ink tattoo of two small flying bird silhouettes above the script word Invictus on the inner wrist and forearm.

Two birds and Invictus script on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand raised against a dark quilted surface, showing the inner wrist. Two small solid black bird silhouettes sit above a flowing script word, Invictus, which runs diagonally down the forearm. The linework is smooth and the ink is uniform black, with no shading or colour.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The martins leave the old pear wall in the last week of August, all at once, the way a room empties after a funeral. You have worked at Hartwell Court for three summers and still find the timing strange, as if the birds keep a calendar the gardeners were never shown. Mrs Pyne says they have nested under the potting shed gutter since her husband's grandfather planted the wall in 1911, and that the family once paid a man from Bristol to block the holes. The martins came back the next spring and the man did not.

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She brings you out a cup of tea on the morning you clear the shed for winter. Inside the back cover of his garden diary, she shows you a poem copied in blue ink, the one about the head bloodied but unbowed. Beneath it, in pencil and a smaller hand, he has written: left the gate open for them. You read it twice while she waits for you to say something sensible. You say nothing sensible. You say the wall looks well.

Among the seed packets you find a tin tray of labels, each one written for a variety of pear long since grubbed out. The last label is blank except for a single grey feather tucked under the wire.

The final martins gather on the telegraph line at dusk. You stand at the wall with a rake, holding it so tightly the handle has printed its grain across your palm. When they lift off together, the gutter above the shed goes quiet. You let the rake fall against the bricks and go to check that the gate is open.

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