Small black fine-line tattoo of three birds in flight above the cursive word invictus, on the upper back of a woman in a bikini.

Invictus script and three birds on the back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in an orange seahorse-print bikini top is photographed from behind on a sunny beach, with her smiling face partly visible at the edge of the frame. The tattoo on her upper back shows three small black bird silhouettes in flight above the word invictus in looping cursive script. The black ink is crisp against warm, sunlit skin, and the background is softly blurred.

Lettering Fine line Back Bird Script Word Silhouette

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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

Your father's boots are still steaming by the range when the whistle goes at half five, and you are the one who lifts them down and sets them out, because your sister is too young and your mother has stopped looking at the clock. Nobody in Haddon Pit says the word invictus. It is a schoolroom word, copied on the slate in Miss Crane's looping hand and wiped away before the inspector comes round.

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From the back step you can see the spoil heap behind the chapel, and above it three rooks that rise together every morning and wheel over the rows before they settle. You count them the way other children count sheep. Your mother says rooks are only rooks, black and bad-tempered. You have decided they go where the dust cannot follow, and that is enough to be going on with.

The winter the Ellis seam floods, you stop waiting for the whistle. You take the slate, the chalk and the last of your savings in a paper bag, and you walk to the halt in the dark. Your father says the valley has you tied to it like a dog to a post. You copy the word once more on the platform bench, slanting it upward so it looks like it could lift off the wood.

The train pulls out with you in the third carriage, coal smoke thick on the glass. Behind the cutting the heap shrinks to a grey thumb, and then three black shapes come up over the embankment, keeping pace with the wheels, until the hills take them and there is only sky, pale and enormous, with nothing written across it at all.