Fine line black script reading inhale the future exhale the past with a flock of small birds above it, on a person's shoulder and upper chest.

Script quote and birds on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is two lines of cursive script reading inhale the future and exhale the past, with a small flock of birds in flight rising above the end of the text. The linework is thin and even, and the ink is solid black with no shading. The skin is lit softly against a pale background, and the tattoo sits along the top of the shoulder near the collarbone.

Fine line Lettering Shoulder Script Quote Bird Text Flock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit you down, sit you down, and mind the sawdust on your good coats. You want the tale of Tobias Wren, the sign-writer's boy, who painted the words over the gate at Harrow's Michaelmas fair. Hush now, I'm getting to it.

Keep reading

Tobias was twelve the summer the fair pitched on the water meadow at Thame, with a fine sable brush he'd bought off a dead man's barrow for tuppence. Mr Harrow wanted a line across the arch of the big gate, and the boy had only one line in his head, the one his mother said every morning over the kettle: inhale the future, exhale the past. He lettered it in black enamel, joined up and slanting, and when it dried he stood back and found the gate looked lonely. So each evening, when the starlings came down over the meadow in their thousands, he sat on the wagon steps and watched them peel off and rise, and he painted three of them flying off the end of the words, then one more, then a whole flock lifting out of the last letters.

The fair moved on that autumn, and the gate went to a scrapyard in Oxford with the rest of the rides. The yard man swore to his dying day that the birds were still lifting off the arch at dawn, though the paint had gone the grey of old pennies and the boy had been gone a dozen years by then, off to sea with nothing but that brush in his coat.

And here is the piece nobody believes. When the scrapper cut the arch loose, he found a tin of enamel rolled up inside it, and a note in a boy's hand saying the words were for whoever came next. Breathe in, my loves. Mind your coats on the way out.