Black and grey tattoo of a bird in flight above the script ex umbris ad lucem, in a blue-toned photograph.

Bird in flight above Latin script

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a bird with spread wings sits in the upper half of the image, with its wingtips reaching toward the upper left. Beneath it, the lowercase italic script ex umbris ad lucem runs across the lower part of the frame in fine black lettering. The photograph has a strong blue cast and soft grain, and the background is pale skin with no other visible detail.

Lettering Bird Script Latin text Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been kneeling in the box hedge since the light went, pulling bindweed out by its white roots, and you only look up when the shed door bangs. The garden has gone the colour of wet slate. Over the wall the rooks are settling in the elms, and one heavy bird comes low over the lawn with its wings set wide, far too late in the day for anything sensible.

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The old sundial stands at the centre of the lawn, its gnomon furred with green, and round the rim someone long dead cut the words ex umbris ad lucem. You never learnt the Latin properly. Your grandfather used to say it meant out of the shadows, then he'd point at the foxgloves as if they had argued the point with him. You asked him once whether the bird on the plinth came from the same sentence, and he said birds were never in sentences, only in the way you looked at them.

The bird drops past the sundial, and for a moment its shape is a hole cut into the last of the sky. You stand, and your knees crack. You follow it toward the glasshouse, where the panes still hold a little gold from the west, and you watch it bank once, catch the light along the underside of its wing, and slip over the wall into the orchard.

You go back to the bindweed. There is one root left, long as a finger, and you work it free slowly, and when it gives you can see your hands again.