Upper arm with a black ink bird tattoo and fine script lettering near the elbow, with a tan suede crossbody bag held against a black t-shirt.

Bird and script tattoos on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a person's upper arm, shown in a black t-shirt and worn with a tan suede crossbody bag. A black ink bird with spread wings sits on the upper arm, with partly visible black script lettering beside it near the elbow. The image is mostly black and grey, with the blue jeans and tan bag as the main colours in the surrounding frame.

Lettering Upper arm Bird Script Lettering

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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 van's radio had given up somewhere after the cattle grid, so Dilys Mott drove the last forty miles of the Pinto Road with the window down and a bundle of letters on the passenger seat, pinned under a tyre iron. The heat came off the tarmac in sheets. Nothing moved except a single black bird riding the thermals above the scrub, wings held flat as if someone had pegged them out to dry.

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She had carried the envelope for three weeks. It was addressed in looping blue ink to Hollis Ranch, Box 9, and the postmark came from a town that had since been drowned under a reservoir. Nobody at the depot could say who had sent it. The stamp was a Queen, the paper was thin enough to read the lines through, and the words inside were only two: come home, the water's back.

At the ranch a boy of about eleven stood at the gate with a dog that would not stop panting. He took the letter without looking at her, read it twice, then looked up at the sky, where the bird had come down to a fence post. "That's my grandad's," he said. "He used to say the birds knew the way back before the men did."

Dilys drove home by the dry reservoir bed, where the cracked mud curled like old paper. The second bundle was still on the seat beside her. She did not open it. Some letters, she had decided, were only ever meant for one reader, and the bird on the fence post was already reading the first.