Black and grey pencil-style drawing of a feather with the script words alis volat propriis beneath it, shown as a tattoo design on a plain background.

Feather with Latin script design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A realistic graphite-style drawing of a feather, curving from upper left to lower right, with soft layered strokes that build shading along its spine and barbs. Below the feather, the words alis volat propriis are written in a flowing cursive script. The image uses only grey tones on a plain white background, with the feather as the dominant element.

Realism Lettering Feather Script Latin text

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

When the harbourmaster's wife stopped getting out of bed, the town sent for the marsh woman, who came up the causeway at dusk with a basket of goose quills and a cough like a rusted hinge. She sat by the window for an hour without speaking. Then she said the fever was not in the lungs at all. It was a bird, caught under the ribs, and it had been beating against the bone since the wedding.

Keep reading

Tobias Penhale, who had chosen his wife's shawl, her hours and her road to church for twenty-two years, stood in the doorway with his hands folded and asked what the cure was. The marsh woman took a grey feather from inside her coat, long as a forearm, and laid it across the wife's palm. Read the sill, she said, and left before the kettle boiled.

Carved into the oak sill, in letters so old the grain had softened them, were the words alis volat propriis. The wife could read Latin, for her father had seen to that before the sea took him. She read it twice. Then she rose, pulled on her own boots, and walked down to the quay alone while the fleet was still raising its sails. The gulls lifted off the harbour wall in one grey sheet, and she watched a single feather come loose and turn over and over, slow as a dropped coin, until it settled on the water and the tide carried it out.