Fine line black script reading free with a small bird in flight on the inner forearm, shown against a pale background.

Free script with a bird on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with the word free written in thin, cursive black linework. A small solid silhouette of a bird in flight sits just beyond the final letter. The ink is a single dark tone on warm skin, and the tattoo is centred in the frame against a pale background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Free Script Bird Lettering

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

Mind the gap, my dears, and sit close, because the 4.10 is never on time and I have only one good story left in me this evening. Ruth Pennock ran the buffet at Hallow Junction for thirty-one years, and the last winter she was there, a boy of about nine came in every Thursday with a single pound coin and a ticket stub that had a bird drawn on the back of it.

Keep reading

He never bought anything. He would stand by the urn until she asked what he wanted, then slide the stub across the counter and say, 'Is this where it goes?' Ruth had no idea what he meant, so she poured him a cup of hot Bovril on the house and told him to ask his mother. He said he could not, because his mother worked the nights at the signal box and never looked up from her levers.

So one Thursday in sleet, Ruth followed him out past the cattle pens and up the embankment to a fence where someone had nailed a board of faded timetables. Carved into the wood, in a looping hand, was the word free. Off the last letter, where the e trailed away, a swallow no bigger than a thumbprint had been cut, as if the word had simply run out of room and the bird had flown on without it.

The boy said his grandad had carved it the year he came home from the war, when the house felt too small for him and he took to walking the line every night. Ruth looked at the swallow for a long while, and then she understood the riddle. The word was the part you could hold. The bird was the part that left. She gave the boy his pound back. He never came to the buffet again, but the next spring a fresh swallow appeared on the timetable board, and I can tell you the 4.10 has been running a little late ever since.