Black script tattoo reading "If I cannot fly, let me sing" on a forearm, with small music notes and birds beside the text.

Quote tattoo with music notes on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two photographs show a fine script tattoo of the phrase "If I cannot fly, let me sing", with two music notes and three small birds in flight. The top image is a close-up of the lettering, and the lower image shows the piece on a forearm with a hand at the right edge. The ink is dark and uniform, with no colour, and the lines are thin and evenly weighted.

Lettering Forearm Quote Script Music note Bird Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The air scrubbers on Halden Station hum at B-flat, and you have been tuning them for eleven years, ever since old Teodor Vance died in the hydroponics bay and left you his brass fork in a biscuit tin. Nobody aboard can fly any more. The hangar doors were welded shut before you were born, and the only bird anyone remembers was a grey thing the children called Pell, which lived for a season in the seed vault and then stopped singing one morning. You still carry its feather in the lining of your coat, and when the vents drift flat you strike the fork against your knee and listen until the room agrees with it.

Keep reading

The Council wants the scrubbers quieter. A quiet station, the clerk said, is a sleeping station, and sleeping people do not file complaints. You told her the vents would only go quiet if the air went stale, and she wrote something down without looking up. So you climb the ladder to the service crawl, where the ducts run warm as bread, and you hum the old song your mother used to sing over the washing lines on the lower ring: the one about the wing that could not lift and the throat that could.

On the third night the vent over the nursery begins to thin. You kneel in the dark with the fork pressed to your ear and hear it, faint and true, a second note riding under the first, and you realise the children have been humming along through the grille without knowing what they copy. Tomorrow you will tell the Council the scrubbers are fine. You will not tell them why.