Black and grey script tattoo reading Angels never leave, they're always at your side, with a feathered angel wing, on the side of a body.

Angel wing and script quote on the side

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black script quote reads Angels never leave, they're always at your side, written in two lines across the skin. A single feathered wing with fine outline and light shading curves up and to the right of the text. The image is black and grey and framed close, with dark fabric in the upper left background.

Lettering Ribs Angel Wing Feather Script Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had thickened in the cold, and Brother Anselm breathed on the nib before he dared to press it to the vellum. Outside the scriptorium the fen mist lay against the windows like wet wool. He was not meant to be lettering this page. Brother Hugh had the prettier hand, the one the abbot liked for dedications, but Hugh had gone down with the fever on Tuesday, and so the commission had come to Anselm with its margins already ruled.

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The words were for the lintel of the new almshouse at Sutton, a plain board to hang above a door where a widow named Edith Marsh would sleep her last winters. The abbot had dictated them himself. Angels never leave, they're always at your side. Anselm had written the line through three times on scrap parchment before he trusted his loops. The long tail of the y had wandered, and the s in side had leaned like a man against a gale, until he sat back and laughed at himself alone in the room.

He wanted something in the margin that the abbot would not notice and Edith Marsh would. In the cloister garth, under the eaves, he had found a barn owl's feather caught in the ivy that morning. He pinned it flat beside the ink pot and drew a single wing from its shape, the primaries sweeping up and to the right, a soft row of coverts at the shoulder, every quill fine enough to need a steady wrist.

Edith came for the board a week later on a borrowed cart. She could not read, and so Anselm read it to her aloud in the cold yard, and she nodded at the words as if they had been spoken to her before. Then she pointed at the small wing in the corner. "That one's not in the abbot's text," she said. Anselm admitted he had put it there. She ran a thumb along the feathered edge, careful of the wet ink, and said nothing for a long while.