Black line drawing of an infinity symbol with three flying birds above its left loop and the word Always in script along its right loop, shown as a flash design on a white background.

Infinity symbol with three birds and Always

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black infinity symbol curves across the image, with three bird silhouettes in flight over its left loop. The word Always is written in a looping cursive script inside the right loop. The design uses solid black ink on a plain white background, with no body part visible.

Lettering Infinity Bird Script Always

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You reach the petrol station at Calico Wells before the heat does, and the woman behind the counter is already halfway through her morning. She keeps a wicker crate under the till with three pigeons in it, grey-blue and quarrelsome, and she tells you they are not hers to keep. They belong to the road. Every dawn she carries them out to the lay-by and lifts the lid, and every dawn they climb over the highway in a wobbling line and come back to the same fence post by evening.

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You ask her why she doesn't let them go properly. She laughs, which you didn't expect, and says her husband drove the long run to Barstow and back, twice a week, for thirty years. He used to say the road was a loop with the desert tied in a knot at its middle, and that pigeons understood knots better than people did. She shows you a faded postcard pinned above the register, the word Always written across it in loose, looping ink. He wrote it on every card he ever posted home, she says, even the ones he sent from the next town over.

You leave with a bottle of water and a map you don't need. Past the second bend the birds pass you low, three dark shapes against the white sky, banking hard over the tarmac as if following the white line. You watch them in the mirror until the shimmer swallows them. At the far end of the straight you see them again, rising from a fence post you could swear you have already passed, and you understand that the road has been keeping its own promise all along.