Fine line black tattoo of a small bird with a thin trailing line and the word Believe on the inner wrist of a clenched fist.

Bird and Believe script on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black bird sits at the left of a thin, wavy line that runs across the inner wrist to the cursive word Believe. The linework is delicate and even, with solid black ink and no visible shading. The skin is light, the background is plain white, and the raised clenched fist fills the frame above the tattoo.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Bird Believe Word Line

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire is going down and the wind has more to say than I do. You want the one about the gull and the twine? Then listen. When the Cassidy boys still tied their boats to the iron ring on Inchmara, a grey gull followed the ferry every morning, and nobody gave it a name, because gulls don't answer to names.

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Old Nessa Gilroy kept the lamp on the north point. Every winter the mainland went quiet for three months, and every winter she sent a line across the sound on a length of tarred twine knotted round a bit of driftwood. The gull took it over to the far slipway, and the mainland folk sent something back the same way. Nobody believed a bird could carry a message that far. Nessa never asked them to. She only tied the knot and let the gull decide.

Then came the winter the ferry failed to return. Fog sat on the water for six days like a wet sheet on a line. The Cassidy boys stopped walking down to the slip, and even Nessa stopped counting the hours on the lamp wick. On the seventh morning the gull dropped the twine at the foot of the lamp-house steps, and tied to it was a slate with one word scratched in her own hand from the first winter, when she had written it to see if anyone would read it. Believe.

They say the ferry's horn sounded through the fog not an hour later, and the gull stood on the slipway with its wings half open, waiting for the men to come down the path. Nessa never told them what she had been waiting for. She only kept the slate on the windowsill, where the light comes in first.