Fine line black tattoo on the ribs reading My life is my message, with three flying birds, a bird on a leafy branch and a cross.

Birds, branch and cross on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A healed black tattoo on the side of a torso, with the script words My life is my message across the centre. Three birds fly above the lettering, and a small bird perches on a thin branch with leaves that curves beneath it toward a tall cross on the right. The linework is delicate and the ink is in shades of black and grey on pale skin, with the design sitting horizontally across the ribs.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Bird Branch Leaves Cross Script Quote

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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

Morag had counted the birds again before the lamp was lit, the way her father had taught her to count the ships. Three that came in off the water at dusk, flying low, wings going like mill sails, and the small brown one that always landed on the blackthorn by the wall as if it had paid rent there. She wrote them in the log under the weather: wind SW, visibility good, three fulmars, one wren, nothing to report.

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The message was the trouble. Her brother Iain had sent it from the mainland in a tin, folded small, with the words he always used, that his life was his message and that she should stop waiting for a letter that explained anything. She had laughed at him for it. Now she read it again by the paraffin glow, the ink gone soft at the creases, and wondered whether he had meant it as a comfort or a dare.

Then the lamp failed. The wick had crusted and the glass clouded, and for ten minutes the headland sat dark while she worked the trimmer with cold fingers. When the beam swung back across the water, it caught the cross on the far rise where the chapel stood over the drowned men's graves, and the three birds lifted off the rock in front of it as if they had been waiting for the light to show them the way home.

She wrote that down too. Nothing to report, she put, then crossed it out and wrote the time instead.