Black and grey fine line tattoo of an infinity symbol with the word always in script and three small birds on the inner wrist.

Infinity symbol with always and three birds on wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is an infinity symbol with the word "always" written in cursive script along its right loop, and three small bird silhouettes flying off the left loop. The linework is clean and mostly uniform, with a slightly heavier stroke on the infinity curve and solid black fill on the birds. The photograph is in black and grey and shows the wrist and part of a hand with painted nails against a striped fabric.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Infinity Always Script Bird

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 dispatch hatch on Tamsin Reach opens at the eleventh bell, and by the time you reach it the cage is already warm from the night watch's hands. Three finches sit on the perch, grey-brown and unimpressed. Your mother taught you the count: one for the shipwright, one for the water deck, and one for whoever is listening at the far end of the long orbit.

Keep reading

The lines on this station run out to Carrow and back in a figure eight, the way every route has run since the founders pinned an old drawing above the lock. You have never seen the drawing itself, only the brass plate beneath it that reads ALWAYS in a looping hand, and the rhyme your grandmother sang about birds that never tire of the turn. Nobody on the water deck can tell you who wrote the plate or why the birds were chosen. They just keep flying the loop.

Yesterday a cage came back through the outer lock with two birds inside and one missing. Carrow's keeper had tied a strip of paper to the wire. It said only: she went on past the bend, the way is long and the light is good. You read it three times in the corridor, then folded it into your sleeve, where it has been pressing against your wrist all morning.

Now you open the hatch. The first finch drops low over the dock lights, banks left, then right, and does not come back. You watch the empty perch for a while, and find you are smiling at it, because the loop was never meant to close.