Fine line black tattoo of a small bird with a thin trailing line leading to the word Believe in script, on the inner wrist.

Bird and Believe script on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A clenched fist is raised towards the camera, showing a small tattoo on the inner wrist. A tiny black bird in flight sits at the left, with a single thin line trailing from it into the cursive word Believe. The linework is delicate and uniform, in black ink on a plain pale background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Bird Believe Script Word Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cage swung against my knee all the way down, the canary pressed flat to its wires as though the dark might be something it could sit on. Dad kept one hand on the rail and the other over mine. The lift dropped past wet brick and the faces of men I half knew from chapel, and I counted the seconds the way Mam had taught me, because counting was the only thing down there that stayed the same.

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At the face the bird was singing. Then, somewhere past the second seam, it stopped. Dad went very still, the lamp on his cap throwing a yellow ring over the roof, and nobody said the word we were all thinking. He tapped the cage twice with his knuckle, the way Nan tapped the kitchen window before a storm, and told it to keep on, you daft thing. The bird shuffled, lifted its head, and sang one thin note that rang off the stone like a bell.

We went up slow with it, and it sang the whole way. When Dad lifted the wire door in the pit yard, the bird didn't wait for the wind. It went straight up past the winding wheel and the grey sky, and the length of red wool Nan had tied to its perch trailed behind it like a kite string, pulled thin and bright until I couldn't tell where the wool ended and the air began.

Mam had written the card for the cage in her best hand, one word and a full stop. Dad pinned it back on the door before the next shift. I still picture that thread going up into the light, and how it never once snapped.