Small black fine line tattoo of the script word fé joined to a line drawn bird, on the inner arm.

Fine line script and bird on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small single-line tattoo shows the script word fé with a simple bird outline drawn from its final stroke. The linework is thin and even in solid black ink, with no shading or fill. The tattoo sits near the centre of a pale, softly lit arm against a plain background, leaving plenty of empty skin around it.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Word Bird Line art

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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

In the village of Sobral Seco the old men said faith had weight, and that a person could only carry so much of it before their arms gave out. So when the widow Teresa Nunes began to sink under her grief, her sister brought her a stub of charcoal and told her to write the word on the wall of the bread oven, where the warmth would keep it from crumbling.

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Teresa wrote fé in her careful schoolroom hand. The little stroke above the e was the hard part, because her wrist kept going slack before the line could close. Each night she came back to try again, and each night the stroke trailed off into nothing. The baker's boy watched her from the sacks of flour. "It looks like a sparrow that hasn't finished landing," he said. She told him to mind the bread.

One February the oven cooled for the first time in forty years, and the word flaked away with the old plaster. Teresa stood before the bare brick and found she could still see it, the last stroke lifting off the wall like a wing. She took up the charcoal and drew the bird in one unbroken line, without lifting her hand once, the way it had always been in her head. When she stepped back, it was facing the road to the coast, where her sister's cart had gone.

The boy says the bird is still there, though the brick has been whitewashed twice since. Teresa still walks past it each morning on her way to the well, and she does not stop, but she does lift her chin a little, the way a person does when someone has finished the sentence they started.