Black fine line script reading alis volat propriis, ending in a detailed feather, drawn as a tattoo design on a white background.

Alis volat propriis script with feather

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A single line of cursive script reads alis volat propriis, with the letters joined by a thin, continuous stroke. A detailed quill-style feather with hatched barbs sits at the right-hand end of the line. The design is drawn in black ink on a plain white background with no body placement shown.

Lettering Fine line Feather Script Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Edith Pask dipped her pen and waited, the nib hovering above the half-sheet while Tom Garrod stood on the step with his cap crushed in both hands. He had come with a message for his father at the brickworks in Lynn, and he wanted it written down exactly. Mother has gone to the laundry at Hunstanton, he said, and we are managing the hens. She wrote the words in a round, careful hand, the pen scratching in the still kitchen air.

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Halfway down the page the boy stopped her. He wanted to add that the roof leaked over his bed and that he had not cried about it. Edith wrote the roof, but when she came to the crying she crossed out the line and wrote instead that he slept well, which was nearer the truth than anything else he had said. Tom watched the quill as if it might bolt. The feather had come from a goose Edith's brother had shot in the autumn, and she had trimmed its barbs with her paring knife until they lay the way she liked.

Under the signature she drew a thin line of flourish and copied out the words cut above the mill door in her father's time: alis volat propriis. Tom asked what it meant. She said it meant the hens would lay in spring, and he looked at her as though he knew she was lying but was too polite to say so. She folded the letter, tucked one loose down from the feather's base inside the envelope, and sealed it with a thumb of warm wax. Tom took it with both hands, as he had taken his cap, and ran off down the lane towards the station.