Fine line black script reading alis volat propriis across the inner forearm, with a cream knit sleeve and denim in the background.

Latin script phrase on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin, black script inscription reads alis volat propriis across the inner forearm. The linework is delicate and even, with small, open letterforms and no shading. The skin tone and soft, neutral setting of cream knitwear and blue denim keep the focus on the lettering.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Latin phrase Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the lane to Scarth Farm by the second week of December, and Ada Lowther walked the flock up to the top field in her late father's boots, stuffed with wool at the toes. Eleven geese followed her in a loose grey line, all of them fat and quarrelsome, except the old gander Sorrel, who had not lifted off the ground since the autumn the fox came through the hedge.

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Her uncle Tobias had come up from Kendal with a van and a list. He stood at the gate with his hands deep in his coat and said the buyer would take the flock at Candlemas, every bird, and that a woman alone could not keep a farm on the strength of a few eggs and a story. Ada said nothing. She had heard the story from her mother, who had heard it from the postman, that a bird with a broken wing could still find its way up a valley if someone walked ahead of it calling.

On the last morning she opened the wall gap at the top field and led Sorrel out onto the white slope. The gander stretched his neck, looked at the far ridge, and beat at the air with the good wing and the bad one until the snow flew off the grass in clouds. He rose a yard, dropped, rose again. Ada ran beside him with her arms out, boots slipping, shouting the words her grandmother had carved above the dairy door, alis volat propriis, which she had never once understood until that moment.

Sorrel cleared the wall. He came down in the valley bottom among the alders, half a mile off, and by the time Tobias had turned the van round the bird was already a grey smudge over the tarn. Ada went home with the rest of the flock and sat at the kitchen table with her uncle's list. Across the bottom of it, in her neatest hand, she wrote: Not at Candlemas.