Watercolour-style bird tattoo in purple and blue with black linework on the upper back and shoulder, with the word freedom in script beside it.

Watercolour-style bird with freedom script on shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A bird in mid-flight is shown across the upper back and shoulder, drawn with loose black linework and splashes of purple, blue and pink that fade into the skin. The word freedom is written in black script on the left, and the wing strokes extend outwards in sketchy lines. The photograph is taken from behind with a plain background, and the tattoo fills most of the frame.

Shoulder Back Bird Freedom Script Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls had given up on us by the time the Marigold cleared the breakwater, all except one, a scrap of blue-grey thing that kept pace off the port bow long after the others peeled away for the chip bags on the quay. My father swore it was a kittiwake. I said it was a swallow that had lost its way, and he told me swallows don't go to sea, which was the first thing we argued about that week and not the last.

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We worked the grounds for eleven days. Hauling was cold, wet work: the net coming up silver and thrashing, Dad's gloves stiff with brine, the hold slowly filling with cod we'd sell for less than the diesel cost. Each morning the bird was there, flicking through the rigging, dipping into our wake and lifting out of it with water running off its wings in lines like pencil strokes. Once I caught myself grinning at it like a fool, and Dad caught me grinning, and neither of us said a word.

On the twelfth day the skipper's radio crackled with weather coming in from the north-west, and Dad ordered the long line hauled early. The sea turned the colour of slate and then the colour of nothing at all. I was tying off the last buoy when the bird landed on the gunwale beside my hand, soaked, its feathers in spikes, and looked at me as if I were the one who needed rescuing.

I cupped it in my palms and carried it to the wheelhouse, where the stove was roaring. Dad took one look, shook his head, and said nothing about kittiwakes. When we docked at dawn I propped the wheelhouse door open to the quay. The bird sat on the rail a moment, shook itself until the purple and blue flew off it in drops, and was gone over the cranes before anyone could say I told you so.