Black and grey tattoos of wings across a shirtless man's upper back and shoulder, with script and detailed shading on the upper arm.

Winged back piece with script on the shoulder

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man is photographed from behind, showing large tattoos across his upper back, shoulder and arms. The main design is a pair of feathered wings across the shoulder blades, with a line of script on the upper arm and dense sleeve work below. The shading is black and grey, and the image is a studio photograph against a plain pale background.

Realism Back Shoulder Upper arm Wing Feather Script Sleeve Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mainsail split in the second week out of Valparaíso, a long tear that ran from the foot to the leech like a zip undone. Mr Pardoe, our bosun, cursed it for an hour and then handed me the palm and a hank of waxed twine, because I was the only one aboard who could stitch a straight seam by lamplight.

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We worked the rip through three nights on the fo'c'sle hatch. Sailors drifted over and sat with us, nobody asking for anything, watching the needle go in and out. Old Tomas, who had rounded the Horn twice and still would not say his age, read aloud from a scrap of paper folded inside his Bible, a line about the wind carrying you where you cannot carry yourself. He made me copy it in pencil along the canvas edge so the seam would hold the words.

By the Azores the sail was whole again, bellied out and white, and the crew had stopped calling me the girl with the palm. Tomas did not live to see Falmouth. We buried him with a stitched shroud and the scrap of paper pinned inside, and when the sail filled that evening it made a sound like a gull lifting off the water.

Ask me what I remember most and it is not the storm. It is the pencil letters running under the stitching, faint as breath, and how the wind pressed against them every hour we were at sea. I kept my own palm after that, and I have never sewn a seam without thinking of him.