Black ink drawing of the words Let me be brave in script lettering, with a bird in flight dissolving into stippled dots at the end of the phrase.

Let me be brave lettering with a bird

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of the words Let me be brave in flowing script, with a large swash on the capital L. The lowercase letters after the L are shaded with fine stippled dots, and a bird in flight at the right dissolves into a trail of dots that continues from the final letters. The design is in black ink on white paper, with no body part shown.

Lettering Dotwork Lettering Script Bird Text Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorrie Bramwell carried the cage up the lane to the chapel twice before she admitted that the canary was not hers to keep. Her father had brought it down the shaft every morning for eleven years, hung on a hook beside the coal face, and when the pit closed that wet March it was the only thing left that still sang. Folk in Harrowgill said the bird went quiet when the air turned bad, and men counted that as a mercy, because it gave them time to climb.

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The new manager wanted the cage sold for scrap. Dorrie wanted the bird let go. She stood by the headstocks with the door open and held out her palm, but the canary would not leave. It hopped to the wire and sang at the brick wall, the same run of notes over and over, until the men gathered with their caps in their hands. "Go on, then," she told it, not gently. "You've done your job. Let me be brave." She had the words from her grandmother, who said them before every shift the way other women said grace.

The bird went then, low over the slag heap and so fast it seemed to be coming apart at the edges. Where its wings beat, the air filled with fine specks like ash that did not settle. Dorrie ran after it along the old tramway until her boots were full of cinders and the thin trail of dots ran out ahead of her, over the hedge and into the grey hills.

When she got back the cage was still open on the tramline, and the wire was clean of feathers. She carried it home empty and hung it on the nail by the door, where her grandmother could see it from the chair. In the morning she went down the lane without it, and when the men asked where she was going, she said she had a shift to start and meant to start it singing.