Black fine line script reading Love with a small bird above it, tattooed on the inner wrist and forearm.

Love script and small bird on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of an inner wrist showing the word Love in a flowing black script, with a small bird in flight to the upper right of the lettering. The linework is thin and even, with solid black ink and no shading, and the skin tone and green plant background are the only other colours. The subject is framed centrally against a dark sleeve, with the tattoo sharply in focus.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Love Script Bird

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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

Sit yourself down by the range, because this one takes a while in the telling, and the kettle will want watching. My father kept the Gull's Rest on the front at Morecambe for thirty-one summers, and in the back bedroom there was a glass case with a stuffed starling in it that nobody would dust. The starling had come in through a broken pane one November and died on the windowsill, and my mother would not let it be thrown out. Every guest who asked was told the same thing: that it was waiting for the spring to come back to it.

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The year the bombs fell on the docks, a lodger came up the steps with one brown case and a letter she would not let anyone read. She was called Nell Harrigan, and she took the back room because it was cheapest, and because the window looked out to the bay where the grey boats went. She wrote every morning at the little desk. Always the same word, over and over, in a hand as careful as a jeweller's, until the page was nothing but loops of it. My mother asked her once what she was writing. Nell said she was practising a word she did not trust herself to say aloud.

On the last Sunday of that August, a swallow came in through the same broken pane. Nell caught it in her two hands, quick as anything, and carried it down to the kitchen. She had a pencil between her teeth and a purple thread on her cuff. She sat on the step and let the bird rest, and she told my mother, very plainly, that the letter was from a man who had gone to sea and had not come home, and that she meant to stop waiting for him to write the next line.

She let the swallow go off the back step. It did not fly to the bay. It went straight up over the roof, and when I looked for it later there was only a small dark mark on the slate where it had settled, as if a pen had touched there and lifted away.