Black and grey tattoo design of birds taking flight beside the script words Don't be afraid to fly, shown without any body placement.

Birds in flight with 'Don't be afraid to fly'

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A drawing of a flock of birds rising diagonally from left to right, with feathered wings rendered in soft grey shading and dark silhouetted edges. The phrase Don't be afraid to fly. is written in black cursive script to the right of the birds. The design is shown in black and grey on a plain white background with the birds and text balanced across a wide horizontal composition.

Lettering Bird Flight Flock Script Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have held the aviary key for three winters now, and every morning the Lord Reeve's clerk asks you the same question at the gate: how many wings are inside? You answer forty-one, because forty-one is what the ledger says, and the ledger has never once been wrong about anything that mattered to the Reeve.

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Your sister Ilse keeps the gate-bell in the eastern tower. She tells you the birds have been restless since the first snow, pressing their chests against the wire and staring past the wall at the grey shoulder of Mount Tessen. She says the old wardens called that look the going-look. You tell her it is only weather. You do not believe yourself, and she knows it, because she has seen you watching the same mountain.

On the night the Reeve's men come for the spare cages, you climb to the aviary alone with a lantern and a lockpick you took from the clerk's desk. The birds shift on their perches and forty-one pairs of eyes catch the light. Your hands are not steady, and you tell yourself it is only the cold. Then you lift the latch and step back, and nothing happens for a long breath, and then the first bird goes out through the open roof like a handful of ash thrown into the wind.

By dawn the flock is a smudge above Tessen, and the ledger still reads forty-one, because you wrote it that way with your own pen. Above the aviary door, in the Reeve's black ink, is a proclamation nobody has read in years. Beneath it, in your careful hand, you have added four words: Don't be afraid to fly. Ilse says it is a foolish thing to leave where anyone might see. You tell her that is the point.