Close photo of a fine line black script tattoo reading alis volat propriis along the ribs, with the arm raised and a grey and maroon striped top visible.

Latin script tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small black script tattoo reads alis volat propriis across the side of the ribcage, with the arm raised above it. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is set against plain skin. The crop centres on the tattoo, with long hair and a striped grey and maroon top at the edges of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind had swung round to the west by noon, and Ishbel Grant had stood at the top of the Tarbert cliff for an hour, holding the frame of the glider her father had built before he went south to the rigs. Below her the ferry was a white dot pulling away from Craignure. Her cousin Alasdair leaned on the fence post with his arms folded and said what the whole island had been saying since spring: that the thing was too heavy, that the canvas would tear, that a girl from Lismore had no business with a machine.

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She thought of the shed behind the Tarbert pier, the pencil lines her father had drawn on the backs of fuel invoices, and the words he had painted above the workbench in letters that ran uphill: alis volat propriis. He had translated them for her the summer she turned nine. She flies with her own wings. It was a motto for boats and for stubborn women, he'd said, and she had decided at the time that it was about gulls.

She ran. The frame bucked in her hands, the cliff edge came up fast, and then the air under the canvas took hold of her all at once, the way a held breath lets go. For three long seconds nothing held her to the ground at all. Alasdair shouted something that the wind tore away.

She came down in the bracken a hundred yards along the slope, the canvas folded over her like a sail that had lost its nerve. She lay still and laughed until she hurt. When she sat up, the ferry had gone round the point and there were only gulls on the thermals, sliding on the same wind she had borrowed, not asking anyone's permission.