Black fine line script quote tattooed along the upper thigh, with a small outlined bird and a red heart below the text.

Quote and bird on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A handwritten-style script quote runs across four lines of the upper thigh, reading as a sentence about protection. Thin black linework forms the lettering, and a small outlined bird in flight sits near the end of the last line, with a tiny red heart beneath it. The text fills most of the frame against plain skin, with green fabric visible at the top edge.

Lettering Fine line Thigh Quote Script Text Bird Heart

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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 officer turns your passport over twice, as if the back might say something the front refuses to, then asks what you have folded inside your coat. You tell him it is only paper. He holds the sheet up to the strip light of the booth, and the pencil lines show through: a grey bird, a scrap of verse, a red dot pressed hard with the cap of a biro.

Keep reading

Your grandfather kept racing pigeons on the flat roof above the bakery in Kavala, and the red ring on the one he called Sofia was the only bright thing in his whole yard. He used to say a bird that knows where home is will go to the end of the sky and back. You copied the words out on the night the letter came, the way he taught you to copy a route, with the wind knocking at the window and nobody left to tell you to slow down.

The officer asks whose words they are. Yours, you say, which is nearly true. The protection is not in the sky over the barrier, or in the stamp he presses down with a small hard click, or in the stripe of tarmac beyond the gate. It is in the habit of coming back, and you had that from him before you had anything else.

He slides the passport through the slot. You fold the paper away, step past the barrier, and the first thing you see is a grey bird lifting off a lamp post, circling once above the lanes, then turning toward the hills you came down from.