Black and white four-panel grid of a fine line infinity tattoo with three flying birds and script words on the inner wrist.

Infinity symbol with birds on a wrist

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A four-panel grid shows the same inner wrist with a thin infinity symbol. Three small flying birds sit on the upper loop, and a script word sits along the lower loop in each panel: forever, always, dream and love. The linework is fine and even, in solid black ink, and the photographs are monochrome with soft grey tones and close crops.

Fine line Lettering Other Infinity Bird Swallow Script Forever Always Dream Love

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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 swallows on the cut-out sign have lost their tails to the weather again, and you are up a stepladder with a tin of black gloss, trying to make the loop meet itself without a pencil line to guide you. Dell from the dodgems shouts that the wind is up and the big top will go over before teatime if you don't get the guy ropes tight. You tell him the sign is the only thing on this field that has to stay still.

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Your mother painted the original board in 1961 for the Ferris wheel, a lemniscate she said was the shape a bird makes when it turns without ever landing. Every spring the fair comes back to the same tarmac behind the Co-op in Wrexham, and every spring someone has to repaint the little birds crossing the upper curve. The word along the bottom was never the same two years running. Forever one season, dream the next, love once, and once a word nobody could make out through the rain.

Dell hands you a brush with a bent ferrule and asks what you want the word to say this year. You look at the three swallows peeling off the edge of the board and think of the ticket girl who left at Michaelmas with a suitcase and no note. You paint slowly, letter by letter, in the looping hand your mother used, and when you step back the loop closes cleanly, the birds lifting toward the fairground lights. It says always. It will do until the tent comes down.