Black and grey feather tattoo with flying birds and script lettering reading alis volat propriis on the side ribs.

Feather and birds with Latin script

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded feather sits at the lower left, with its quill angled up and to the right, and a trail of small bird silhouettes rises from its tip towards the top of the frame. The script lettering reads alis volat propriis in a flowing cursive, running beneath and alongside the feather. The tattoo is rendered in black and grey ink on a close crop of the side of the torso, with the feather showing soft tonal shading.

Lettering Realism Ribs Feather Bird Script Latin text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp has guttered again by the time you reach the top of Scarrow Point, and the wind is trying to pull the gallery door off its hinges. You wedge it with your boot, shake the rain from your oilskin, and find your father's logbook lying open where he left it on Tuesday. His cramped hand fills the last page: Wings off the north rocks at dusk, a dozen or more, heading south. Did not count the stragglers. Below you the sea is the colour of slate and full of gulls that have forgotten how to fly straight.

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The mainland letter came on Monday, the Board's pale envelope with the crest you have never liked. Thirty pounds a week and a room above a chandler's in Keld, the kind of work your father swore was the only honest thing left in the country. You have not answered it. Instead you have spent three nights watching the birds come in low over the glass, bunched and ragged, lifting at the last moment as if the light itself were a hand pushing them up.

On the brass plate above the door your grandmother's words are worn almost smooth, alis volat propriis, and you have read them so often you no longer see them. She flies on her own wings. You used to think it was a boast. Now it sounds more like an instruction you were given too late to follow without help.

You trim the wick, polish the lens with the chamois, and light the lamp. Then you pull the feather from the logbook's spine, where it has been pressed since your father's last summer, and step out onto the gallery. The wind takes it at once. For a moment it hangs beside the beam, dark against the turning light, and then a line of small birds breaks from the rocks below and rises after it into the dark.