Black and grey fine line tattoo of a small bird beside the script words this too shall pass, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Bird and script quote on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small solid bird silhouette sits at the left of a single line of cursive script reading this too shall pass. The thin, even linework is black with no shading, and the lettering runs across the inner forearm towards the wrist. Two fingers rest on a pale surface in the lower part of the photograph, and the image is black and white.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Bird Swallow Script Quote Text

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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

The function room above the Crown smelled of carpet shampoo and warm sausage rolls, and I had spent most of an hour avoiding the corner where Mr Ashdown was holding court over a glass of lemonade. Then Dawn Pilling came across the room with her name badge stuck slightly crooked to her cardigan and said, 'You're the one who drew swallows on everything.'

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I was. In the fourth year Mr Ashdown confiscated my maths jotter for the birds in its margins, each one flying off the squared paper as if it had been startled off a telegraph wire. He wrote something underneath my name in red biro, the same line he wrote on every report he signed that year, and we all took the mickey out of it: this too shall pass. Dawn had sat beside me then. She remembered the birds better than I did.

I sign shop fronts for a living now, mostly gold leaf on glass, and I told her so. She laughed and took a folded paper napkin out of her handbag. On it, in pencil, someone had written the line in careful joined-up letters, the loops tall and a little wobbly, and it took me a second to understand that the handwriting was not Mr Ashdown's. 'My mum's,' she said. 'She copied it out for me before the funeral. Said it was the only useful thing he ever wrote.'

I didn't ask for the rest. I borrowed a biro from the bar and drew a small bird at the left-hand edge of the napkin, four strokes with the wings swept back, and slid it across the table. She folded it along the same crease and put it away in her purse. Behind us Mr Ashdown was reading out the names of everyone he had taught, and he got nearly every one of them wrong, and nobody minded.