Black and grey winged W emblem with a teal awareness ribbon across the inside of a wrist.

Winged emblem with teal ribbon on wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a tattoo on the inside of a wrist, showing a winged emblem with a W-shaped base. The wings are shaded in soft grey gradients with bold black outlines, and a teal ribbon crosses the centre of the design. The close, straight-on framing shows the raised hand at the top of the frame against a wooden floor.

Forearm Wing Ribbon Emblem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The women of Skerrow kept the gulls' names. Every boat that went out past the breakwater carried a painted pair of wings on her bow, grey at the feathers and black at the edge, so the birds would know whom to follow home. Old Mairi Tulloch said the wings were a promise and not a decoration, and she would not let the men repaint them in autumn when the herring turned.

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The year the Brightwater went down off the Ness, nobody could find her ribbon. Mairi tore a strip from her own teal shawl, the colour of the sea under ice, and knotted it through the rail where the wings met the W of the bow. Every morning she walked to the harbour wall and counted the gulls sitting on the cranes. Thirteen, then twelve, then none, and then one grey bird with a torn left wing landed on the rail and would not leave.

The men said it was only a gull. Mairi fed it mackerel heads from the gutting table and talked to it as if it were a son who had come back thin. In March the Brightwater's skipper, young Davie Grieve, walked in on a Sunday, soaked to the bone and smelling of diesel, having been picked up by a Norwegian trawler and carried round the Pentland Firth. He asked who had tied the ribbon. Mairi pointed at the gull.

Davie laughed until he coughed. Then he went down to the boat and found the knot still holding, the teal gone grey with salt, and he left it where it was. The gull flew off the next morning and was not seen again, which is how Skerrow knows the wings on the bows are meant to be followed, and not wept over.