Black lettering tattoo reading freedom with a small bird silhouette above the final letters, on the inner wrist, in a Lettering style.

Freedom lettering with a bird on the wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells the word freedom in black serif-style lettering across the wrist, with a small bird silhouette flying above the last letters. The linework is solid and even, with some slight softening at the edges. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of pale skin with a plain background, and the tattoo sits centred in the frame.

Lettering Forearm Freedom Bird Text Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the rain doesn't reach under this awning, and the ones who lean in hear the best bits. Mind the puddle by the fish crates. There was a sign-writer in this market, Hollis Maddox, who painted shop names on tin for threepence a letter, and he had one rule: he never painted a word he hadn't said out loud first.

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One wet Thursday a woman came up from the bus station with a shoebox under her arm. Inside was a grey feather and a folded map of the coast. She wanted a word painted on the sill of her mother's flat, somewhere the sun could reach, and she wanted it small. Hollis asked her which word. She said the one her mother used to shout across the yard when the gate was left open. He said it back to her, quietly, once. Then he dipped his brush.

He painted it in a serif hand, the old kind with feet on every letter, so the word stood on its own like a man waiting at a bus stop. Then, because the feather had put the notion in his head, he set a swift above the last letters, three quick strokes and no more. The woman asked if the bird was necessary. Hollis said a word on its own only asks for something. A bird on it has already gone.

They say the sill is still there, though the flat has new people now. The rain still falls on this market every Thursday, and every Thursday somebody stops under the awning to read the little word on the tin and looks up, half expecting the swift to have moved.