Black ink infinity symbol with looping script lettering above a tribal-style bird with a long flowing tail, tattooed on a person's ribs.

Infinity script and bird on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black infinity symbol outlined in cursive script lettering sits above a stylised bird with a long, swirling tail. The bird is drawn in bold black linework with tribal-style flourishes on its wings and tail, and the script is fine and even. The design is shown in black ink on smooth skin against a plain background, with the body's side and ribs filling most of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Infinity Script Bird Hummingbird Swirl Tail feather Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the fire's only warm on one side. No, not the ship's fire, that's reactor glow and it'll cook your eyebrows. Now. Eighty years ago, on the ring-station Tessaly, there was a bird.

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Not a real bird. Nobody had seen a real bird since the greenhouse decks were sealed. This one was made by a tinker named Oyelaran Vance, who built it from salvaged hull wire and a tail of spun filament so fine it drank the light. She built it for her sister, who had taken the long shuttle out to the mining moon Corr and would not be back for a decade. Every night the bird went out through the cargo lock, looped the two stations on its tail, and came home with a message folded under one wing.

The message her sister sent back was always the same, two lines scratched on the inside of a ration wrapper: Always together, but never in hearts. Maybe in distance, never apart. Vance laughed at it the first time and cried at it the fifth, and by the tenth she had it so well memorised she said it to the cook while frying eggs.

Then the relay failed. Corr went dark for eleven weeks. Vance kept winding the bird every evening and sending it into the black on a tail that pointed nowhere. On the seventy-second night a small blue light blinked back at her through the viewport, slow and patient, tracing a loop exactly the shape of her sister's handwriting.

That's the whole tale, and not much of one, I'll grant you. But the bird's still up there, if you know where to look. Mind your heads on the way out.