Black script lettering reading Courage with small flying birds beside it, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Courage script with flying birds

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the word Courage written in flowing black cursive script on a plain white background. Several small bird silhouettes fly off the end of the word, with one trailing from beneath the letters and others rising to the right. The design uses solid black ink with no grey shading or colour.

Lettering Courage Script Bird Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the high road for nine days, and Ada Brindle had stopped counting coins and started counting sacks of meal. Up in the back room the carter from Lowther lay with a fever, and every night he asked the same question: would the birds come back before the thaw?

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Nobody at the Crooked Hart knew what he meant. Ada asked the old shepherd, who said the starlings went south in autumn and never came back to the valley, but that his grandmother had sworn a flock of small black birds once lifted out of a dead hearth at the end of a hard winter, and that each one was a person who had stopped being afraid. Ada thought it was nonsense, the sort of thing said to keep a child in bed. Still, she went out onto the drift at dusk with a lantern and shouted at the white.

For three nights nothing came. On the fourth, the snow stopped in mid-fall and the sky went the colour of pewter. Five birds rose from the hedge below the inn, sharp as pen strokes, and flew in a line that curled upward like the tail of a letter. They did not turn south. They went straight up the slope toward the pass, one trailing a little behind the others as though it wanted to be certain of the way.

The carter got up the next morning, took his boots from the hearth, and walked out to find the road open. He left a single black feather on the windowsill and four shillings under the salt cellar, with a note that said only: Go on. Ada kept the feather in the tin with the coins, and she never again asked the shepherd about birds.