Black script lettering reading Breathe, with a flock of small black birds rising from the final letters, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Breathe script with flying birds

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the word Breathe written in a flowing, calligraphic script with long, looping strokes and tapered ends. A group of small black birds in flight rises from the upper right of the word, suggesting movement. The design is solid black on a plain white background with no shading, and the composition places the lettering across the lower left with the birds above it.

Lettering Breathe Script Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Ashgrove House stopped between the ninth and tenth floors with a shudder that rattled every tin in my shopping bag. Mr Lusk's canary, in its cage on my hip, went quiet for about four seconds and then started up again, as if it had paid for the ride and meant to get its money's worth. I pressed the alarm, waited, pressed it again, and listened to the intercom hiss like a kettle nobody had come to.

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Nan taught me the trick of this building when I was small enough to be frightened of its stairwells: in through the nose for four, hold for four, out through the mouth for four, and keep going until the walls stop leaning in. I did that now, sat on the steel floor with my back against the panel, while the canary sang and the light buzzed. Somewhere above us a man called Sol said over the speaker that the engineer was twenty minutes out, which in Ashgrove time meant forty.

I had nothing to do but count, so I counted the cage bars, then the rivets on the door, then the tiny scratches left by a hundred people's keys. When the doors finally juddered open on the tenth floor, the light fell in grey and wide, and above the car park a flock of starlings lifted off the roof all at once, a black cloud pulling itself loose from the concrete and turning over the tower.

Mr Lusk, who had never once said a word to me in six years, stepped out beside me and watched them too. "Going somewhere, are they?" he asked. I told him no, just going up, and then I lifted the cage from my hip and carried the bird out into the open air.