Black and grey winged shield emblem with the script words Surrender your heart beneath it, tattooed on a person's upper back.

Winged shield and script on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare upper back shows a black and grey tattoo of a shield with angular wings, drawn in bold outlines with solid black and grey shading. Below it, the words Surrender your heart are written in thin black cursive script. The skin around the tattoo is slightly red, and the dark clothing off the shoulders frames the composition against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint had not dried on the last shield when Mabel Teague came up the hill road with her brother's cloak folded over one arm. Osric Hale had painted the wings on every shield the wall watch carried for eleven years, and he knew a new recruit by how she stood when she was trying not to shake. He took the cloak, shook out the dust, and laid it on the bench beside a tin of black and a tin of grey.

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"Wings first," he said. "Always the wings. The shield is only the place they sit."

He showed her how to pull the feather lines long and sharp, how to let the grey bleed into the black so the metal looked like it had been struck in a cold forge. Above the barracks door, under the same emblem, a sergeant had once chalked the words Surrender your heart. Nobody had ever agreed on what it meant. Some thought it was a cruel joke for men who were sent out past the gate. Osric thought it was advice for the nights when a sentry was tempted to run.

When the cloak's collar was finished, Mabel asked him whether her brother had known what the phrase meant. Osric wiped his brush and didn't answer straight away. He said the boy had asked him the same question, and that he had told him the truth, which was that a heart given to the wall was a heart you could stop carrying up and down the hill every night.

She hung the cloak on the peg by the door, the painted wing turned towards the road, and went out into the dusk without looking back at the workshop lamp.

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