Fine line black script reading wanderlust with three small birds in flight, tattooed on the upper chest below the collarbone.

Wanderlust script and three birds on the chest

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the word wanderlust written in a thin, joined script, with three small birds in flight to its right. The linework is single-weight and solid black, with no shading, and the ink sits crisply on pale skin. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame, with the neck and shoulder softly blurred at the edges.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on Hessle Street believed Mr Tully's pigeons came home on purpose. They came home because he rattled the tin of corn at six every evening, because the loft had a bulb left burning, and because the boards stayed warm from the bakery chimney next door. That was his explanation, anyway, delivered with his cap pushed back and one elbow on my fence. The birds that never came back were the ones he really wanted to talk about.

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The spring his wife's sister emigrated to Canada, he started chalking a word on the loft door, lettered in a joined-up hand the way the old railway forms were written, so it ran together like one long breath. Wanderlust, he called it, though he said it like a dare. Three of the grey hens went that April and didn't return. He chalked three small strokes at the end of the word too, flying off towards the gasworks, and left them there for a week.

I asked him once why he kept the word up if it only reminded him of what was gone. He flicked the latch and let a bird walk across his palm. "It's not the going I mind," he said. "It's that somebody has to stand at the door when they decide."

The next morning the chalk was rubbed out and the boards were clean. Three new birds sat on the gutter above it, watching us both as though we were the ones who might leave.

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