Fine line black script tattoo reading alis volat propriis on the upper back, just below a black lace bra strap.

Fine line Latin script on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small black script tattoo of the words alis volat propriis sits on the upper back of a person wearing a black lace bra and a grey vest top. The thin, even linework is set in a cursive lettering style with no shading. The text is black on skin, and the grey top and dark bra frame it in a plain, neutral composition.

Fine line Lettering Back Script Lettering Latin text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind off the col was already wrong by half past seven, Maud noticed, the way it lifted the tarpaulin off the Kestrel and dropped it again like a nervous hand. Her father had taught her that a glider never argued with weather; you simply asked it nicely and waited for an answer. He had painted the motto on the hangar door the summer she turned nine, in letters so careful they looked written with a fountain pen. alis volat propriis. She flies with her own wings. Nobody in the village had ever been able to tell him which of them she was meant to be.

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She was fifteen now and had been refusing the tow rope since March. Her instructor, a patient man called Ivo who smelled of two-stroke and peppermints, stood at the winch with his clipboard and did not look at her. He had learned that much from her father.

"Release at four thousand," he said. "You know the number."

"I know the number."

The line went taut, the ground fell away under the nose, and for a while there was only the groan of the fuselage and the bright lurch of the thermal coming up through the floor. Maud let the rope drop, feeling the sudden silence like cold water. The pass opened beneath her, grey rock and a river like a cut ribbon, and she turned into the lift the way her father had always said to, slow and without fuss.

When she landed an hour later her hands would not stop shaking. Ivo walked out across the stubble with his clipboard, wrote something down, tore the sheet off and folded it into her palm. It said only: solo, 14:10. Underneath, in a hand she had not expected to find anywhere but the door, someone had added one word more: finally.