Two matching black and grey shoulder tattoos of three birds on a branch, with script reading Where you go, I'll go and Where you stay, I'll stay.

Matching bird and script shoulder tattoos

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Two people are shown from behind, each with a tattoo on the shoulder blade area. Each design shows three small birds perched on a thin curved branch above a line of cursive script. The shading is soft grey on the birds and dark, clean linework on the lettering, and the photo is taken at a close angle with a plain background.

Lettering Fine line Shoulder Bird Branch Script Quote Lettering

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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

The name badges are still in the shoebox by the urn, and somebody has taped your old Year Eleven photo to an easel, so you are fifteen again in a room that smells of squash and floor polish. Priya Chadha from the Lower Sixth waves a Hobnob at you across St Clement's hall. She wants to know if you still have the birds.

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Everybody in your year knew about the birds. The Saturday you and Dom Hartley walked into Inkwell on Cheapside with a biro sketch of a branch and three sparrows, and walked out with two matching pieces, because neither of you would let the other pay for half. The lettering was his idea, a curly script he'd copied off a Fleetwood Mac album sleeve. He spelled 'stay' wrong on the stencil and then insisted it was right. "Where you go, I'll go," he said, as if that were a fact about the weather.

Dom is at the far end by the tea urn, greyer at the temples, holding a paper cup like it might leak. You did go. Leeds, then Bristol, then a flat above a launderette with a view of nothing much. He stayed, and the promise got longer and quieter the further apart you grew, until neither of you mentioned it. You cross the hall anyway. He grins and says, "Still got yours?" and you say it's still there, which is true, and that you're not sure it ever meant what it said, which is also true.

The DJ plays a song you both danced to at the leavers' do. You dance one song, badly, under the disco ball with its one dead facet. Outside, when you go to find your car, two swallows lift off the wire above the car park, one after the other, not quite together, and you stand there watching until they are out of sight.