Black and grey fine line tattoo of two birds perched on a wire and a third bird flying, with the word believe in script, on a person's ribs.

Birds on a wire with 'believe' script

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two small birds sit on a single thin wire, with a third bird flying above them to the left. The word believe runs in cursive script along the same line to the right. The linework is fine and crisp, with soft grey shading on the birds, and the black and white photograph is framed across the ribs and side of the torso.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Bird Wire Flying bird Script Believe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wire sagged over the Pryce orchard like a washing line nobody had bothered to take in, and by the last week of August there were always birds on it, jostling for room while the wasps worked the windfalls below. From the top rung of the ladder you learned to count them without looking up for long. Two sat close together at the middle span, and one kept circling back to the gatepost as if it had forgotten something on the other side.

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Your uncle Ned said the line had been strung in 1961 to carry a telephone out to the packing shed, and that the telephone had died a decade later but the wire had never been cut. Nobody on the farm had the heart to take it down. Your mother painted the word on the shed door the summer before she left, in looping letters with a brush too fine for the job, and the paint had cracked in the sun so that the last letters looked like they were trailing off into the field. You used to think she meant it as an instruction. By the time you were sixteen you suspected she had only been writing down what she needed to hear.

That last Saturday the Bramleys were ready and the coach to Maidstone left at four. Ned held the ladder steady and said nothing about the bag by the gate, which was how you knew he had seen it. You picked until the light went copper and the birds shifted along the wire, one by one, until the flying one dropped back down beside its pair.

You tucked the final apple into your apron, climbed down, and stood a moment under the line. Then you walked to the gate, lifted the bag, and did not look back at the shed door, though you could feel the word there, still holding on.