Black and grey tattoo of a bird in flight above the words Free Bird in script on the back of a hand.

Bird in flight and Free Bird script on a hand

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a hand with a shaded bird in flight above the words Free Bird written in a cursive script. The bird has soft grey shading and defined outlines, while the lettering is crisp and solid in black ink. The monochrome image shows rings on the fingers and a dark background that keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Lettering Traditional Hand Bird Swallow Script Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow had lived in the wicker cage so long that the bars were worn pale where its beak had touched them. Nobody in Little Sewell could say who first hung it in the barn rafters, only that Hester Vane kept it there because her mother had, and that a bride married under a caged bird would never be let out of her own kitchen.

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On the morning of Ruth Calloway's wedding, Hester climbed the ladder with a bag of bread crusts and found the cage door hanging open. The bird sat on the sill, fat and unhurried, watching the church spire through a gap in the slates. Hester stood there a long while with the crusts going soft in her fist. Then she climbed down, carried the empty cage across the lane, and set it on the churchyard wall where the whole village could see it.

At the vows, when the vicar asked whether anyone knew cause why the couple should not be joined, the bird came out of the yew tree and went over the heads of the guests like a thrown stone. It circled the tower twice, dipped low over the bridal veil, and sped off towards the river. Tom Pritchard laughed loudly and said the creature knew where its bread came from, and Ruth said that was the first sensible thing anyone had said all day.

The next April a pair of swallows nested in the Pritchards' barn, and Hester swore one of them was the same bird, though she was too old by then to climb up and check.