Black script tattoo reading All good things are wild and free, with a shaded feather and small birds, across a woman's upper chest and shoulder.

Feather and quote across a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads All good things are wild and free in cursive script, ending in a shaded feather with a small flock of birds rising beneath the words. The linework is fine and the feather uses soft grey shading, while the lettering is solid black. The close crop shows the upper chest and shoulder of a woman in a dark strapless dress against a blurred background.

Fine line Lettering Shoulder Feather Bird Script Quote

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skipper of the Marigold had a rule about gulls. When they stopped trailing the stern, we stopped shooting nets, and no owner in Eyemouth had ever talked him out of it. Ruairidh Coll was sixty-three that February, with hands like knotted rope and a habit of saying nothing for an hour, then one sentence you turned over for the rest of the trip. I was nineteen and six weeks aboard, mostly seasick and mostly sorting haddock into boxes with my eyes streaming from the salt.

Keep reading

The morning the wind swung north-east, a gannet came down out of nowhere and landed on the wheelhouse roof, shaking water from its wings like a dog. Ruairidh stood on the step and watched it for a long while. Then it lifted, and a long grey feather came loose and spun down onto the foredeck by my boots. He picked it up, turned it against the light, and handed it to me without a word. 'Keep that,' he said. 'It's the only thing the sea gives back that's still any use.'

We ran for the harbour mouth with the sky the colour of slate and the swell building behind us. Halfway in, a flock of small dark birds rose off the water ahead, dozens of them, lifting in a loose rope against the cloud, and the skipper eased the throttle to let them pass. He leaned out of the window and hailed the other boats, and when the first one answered he laughed, a rare sound. 'All good things are wild and free, Jessie,' he said. 'Don't go telling the insurers that.'

Ruairidh died the next winter, and the Marigold was sold to a firm in Peterhead. I still have the feather. It's grey at the tip where the salt got into it, and it lives in the inside pocket of my oilskins whenever I go out. On the days the gulls stop following, I take it out and look at it before I look at the water.