Black script lettering reading live free with three flying birds on a woman's upper back, photographed from behind.

Live free script with birds on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind with her blonde hair pulled to one side and one hand resting on her neck. The tattoo is the words live free written in a flowing black script, with three small bird silhouettes flying off the end of the lettering on the upper back near the shoulder blade. The image is warm toned with a dark background, and the ink is solid black against the skin.

Lettering Back Script Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Erskine had counted geese over the Cheviot fence for thirty-one years, and in all that time the Border Agency had never once asked her to stop. The post at Carter Bar was a tin hut with a kettle, a barrier arm and a logbook, and the logbook was the real job. Every dawn she wrote down what crossed: pinkfeet in their ragged wedge, a heron that never looked where it was going, once a buzzard that landed on the barrier and had to be shooed off with a broom.

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The morning Ruairidh Lyall drove up the road in a borrowed Land Rover, she was already on her third cup. He was a customs clerk from the Carlisle office, young, with a folder under his arm and the careful face of someone sent to close a place down. He said the post was being shut for good. He said it kindly, which was worse. Mags went on pouring and said nothing until the first skein came over the ridge, low and loud, and both of them stopped talking.

They watched the birds pass the wire without slowing. Ruairidh opened his folder, looked at the blank form inside and then at the logbook open on the counter, its columns full of other people's weather. Mags handed him her pen. He wrote one line in the margin, under the last entry, and when he turned the book round she read it: live free, the letters leaning into the wind like the birds did, with three small strokes trailing off the end of the word.

She didn't tell him to take it out. She only dipped the pen again, ticked the date, and wrote the count beside it: four hundred and twelve, all through, none held back.