Black handwritten script design reading 'love her but leave her wild' with 'atticus' beneath, lettering style, shown on a plain white background with no body placement visible.

Handwritten 'love her but leave her wild' quote

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black handwritten script quote reads 'love her but leave her wild', with a smaller '-atticus-' attribution centred beneath it. The linework is a fine, even monoline in black ink on a plain white background, with the first line set slightly higher and larger than the second. The composition is centred and uncluttered, with no shading or colour.

Lettering Quote Script Love Handwriting

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

Ilu the herder built his wife Sabitu a house with four good walls and one sturdy door, because he loved her and wanted her safe. Every morning she walked past it, up the stony path to the ridge where the wind came off the salt marsh, and every evening she came back with dust on her hem and a sprig of thyme in her fist. The neighbours shook their heads over their bread. A woman should be kept close, they said, the way a goat is kept close, or she will find the gap in the fence and be gone.

Keep reading

So Ilu walked two days to the town and paid a scribe two measures of barley to cut a message into a clay tile. The scribe asked what it should say. Ilu scratched his beard and thought of the ridge, and the thyme, and the way Sabitu's face opened when the wind caught her hair. Say love her, he said, and then, after a long while, but leave her wild. The scribe grumbled that the second part was longer and charged him extra for every sign.

Ilu hung the tile above the door, where the neighbours could read it if they cared to. Over the years the clay cracked and the lintel grew grey, and the door never did get a lock. When Ilu died in the dry month, the neighbours came to sit with Sabitu and found her already gone up the path. They stood in the yard and read the tile aloud, slowly, the way people read a thing they have been told is a joke.

At dusk she came down the ridge with thyme in her fist and dust on her hem, and the door stood open, as it always had.