Black and grey fine line tattoo of a feather with small birds and the script words free yourself on a person's upper back.

Free yourself script and feather on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo reads free yourself in flowing script, with a feather above the word yourself and small birds drifting up and away from its tip. The linework is thin and even, with light shading along the feather's barbs. The photograph is in black and white, with the tattoo placed across the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Fine line Lettering Back Feather Bird Script Quote

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

The third pardon I wrote that week was for the bell-ringer's son, and my hand would not stop shaking over the last line. Lord Ambrec wanted the seal pressed before the noon bell, so I cut a fresh quill from a grey goose that had blundered into the scriptorium window, and I dipped it in the soot-black ink we keep for the gaol rolls. The sentence was short: free yourself. Clerks in Veyl are not supposed to write such things.

Keep reading

I wrote it in the looping hand the old masters taught, the capitals tall and the tails long, the way a bird's flight curls when it has nowhere to hurry. When I lifted the nib, the last stroke had beaded, and a drop ran down into the margin and split into three dots, then five, then a flock. I watched them lift off the vellum and climb past the lamp toward the dark of the rafters, where the swifts nest and no warden goes.

Ambrec came in at the bell and read the pardon with his thumb on the wax. He asked what the drawing was. I told him it was only a feather, which was true enough. He said the birds were a foolish flourish and I should have kept to the words. Then he signed it, because a signature is a signature, and the boy walked out of the east gate before the bell had finished humming.

I still find feathers in my sleeves some mornings, small grey ones with barbs split from the weight of ink. I have stopped sweeping them up. Veyl has no scriveners left who dare to add a bird, but the old ledgers in the rafters are full of them, and now and then I hear wings above the gaol rolls.