Fine line black script tattoo reading what if you fly on the side of a torso, with pink lace lingerie along the bottom edge of the image.

Fine line script reading what if you fly

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a fine line script tattoo reading what if you fly, set across the skin of the side of the torso. The linework is thin and even, in a single dark grey-black ink, with slight variation in the letter weights. Pale skin, soft lighting and a pink lace and satin edge at the lower left frame the lettering.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Lettering Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kite-maker's boy had cut his hand on the ash frame, so it fell to Nell to finish the order before the autumn fair. Her father was down on the quay arguing about tar. She sat at the trestle with the pot of gall ink and a brush worn down to three hairs, and she copied out the words the customer had written on a scrap of sail-cloth: what if you fly. It was a strange thing for a sea captain's widow to want across a red kite, but Mrs Oakes paid in good silver and did not ask questions.

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The letters came out thin, because Nell had been told a line should be as fine as wire if it was to lift in a breeze. She wrote the w twice before it sat right, then the rest with her tongue between her teeth. When the ink dried she held the kite up to the window, and the light came through the paper so the words looked as though they had been written on the sky itself.

Mrs Oakes collected it the next morning and did not thank her. She climbed the sea wall with her grandson, a boy of nine with a cough and a face like a folded letter, and she let the kite go. It climbed fast, the way kites do over water when the wind comes off the Wash. Nell watched from the loft door until it was a red fleck over the grey.

Three weeks later a fisherman brought a bundle of wet paper up from the tide line. Most of it was pulp. One square of red, pinned under a stone at the top of the beach, still showed the thin black line of the words. Nell took it home and pressed it flat under the cutting board, and kept it there, and did not once say the boy's name aloud.