Colour flash design of a blue and pink bird on a flowering branch with the script Never Clip My Wings and two music notes.

Bird on a branch with Never Clip My Wings script

Lettering · Colour · Flash

A stylised songbird perches on a brown branch with green leaves and small pink flowers. The words Never Clip My Wings are written in black script across the branch and bird, with two music notes above. The bird is drawn with bold black outlines and flat fills of blue, purple and pink on a plain white background.

Lettering Botanical Bird Branch Leaves Flower Music note Script Wing

Find an artist for this

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 bramleys were coming down faster than we could gather them, wasps working the windfalls in the long grass, and Uncle Tom had decided the blue-and-pink bird in the shed would fly off with the first cold snap unless somebody took the edges off its wings. He handed me the nail scissors and a towel and said it would take a minute. I was twelve and believed him.

Keep reading

Aunt Nell was in the doorway before I had the towel open. She didn't shout. She looked at the scissors until I set them on the workbench, then she lifted the cage latch herself and held out one finger. The bird stepped onto it as if it had been waiting all summer for permission. "A bird that can't leave isn't kept," she said. "It's only stuck." I thought she was being soft, and I told her so.

That evening we carried the cage down to the bottom orchard, where the old hedge meets the lane. Nell opened the door and sat on an upturned crate with her hands in her lap. The bird studied the open sky for a long time, then dropped onto the nearest branch, shook out its feathers and sang a run of notes that climbed like the two little marks Tom had painted on the sign by the gate. Nobody spoke. Behind us the wasps went on at the fallen fruit.

The bird came back twice that autumn, once for the seed Nell left on the gatepost and once, I think, because the orchard was the only place it knew well enough to be happy. The scissors are still in the workbench drawer. I have never used them. When I climb the ladder now I hear it somewhere above me, a little ahead of the wind, singing those same rising notes at the top of the trees.