Pencil drawing of a tattoo design: an infinity symbol with the words be strong believe in cursive script, with small birds flying across the lines on lined paper.

Infinity symbol with 'be strong believe' script and birds

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn design shows an infinity symbol enclosing the handwritten phrase be strong believe in cursive script. Several small birds fly through the space beside the lettering. The linework is dark and fine, with light shading on the paper, and the design sits on torn lined paper.

Lettering Infinity Script Quote Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The car had been coughing since Coyote Wells, and Ruth Ambrose kept one eye on the temperature gauge and the other on the long grey ribbon of Route 62 unspooling into the heat. Her brother had written the directions on the back of a petrol receipt, in capitals, and the last line said only: KEEP GOING PAST THE DRY LAKE. She had not told him she would.

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Past the lake the birds came up off the verge all at once, a loose scatter of finches that flicked across the windscreen and wheeled back over the road as if they were stitching it closed. She slowed without meaning to. Her father used to say birds knew the shape of a road better than any map, that they flew where the ground had already decided to go.

She pulled onto the gravel at a derelict fuel stop with a sign that read only WATER, and found the lined notebook where she had left it under the seat. Inside, in her father's cramped hand, were a dozen half-finished sayings, most of them crossed out. On the last page he had drawn a loop on its side, two long arcs closing around three words, and beneath it: be strong, believe. The ink had faded to the colour of weak tea.

The engine ticked as it cooled. She sat with the notebook open on her knee until the finches came back to the wire fence and settled in a row, watching her the way he always had, as though waiting for her to finish the sentence. Then she started the car, turned it round, and drove back towards the lake.