Black fine line script tattoo reading inhale the future exhale the past, with four birds in flight, on a shoulder.

Script quote and flying birds on shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the words inhale the future and exhale the past in a slanted, cursive script, with the second line set slightly lower than the first. Four small solid black birds rise diagonally above the end of the text. The linework is thin and even, and the design is in black ink on pale skin, photographed close up against a softly lit background.

Fine line Lettering Shoulder Bird Script Quote Flying bird Text

Find an artist for this

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

Nell Ashby swept the sprung floor of the Gilded Ferry every Sunday before the band came in, and every Sunday she found small dark feathers wedged between the boards. Her father blamed the pigeons off the gasworks roof. Her mother said nothing, but she stopped propping the skylight open in summer, and she taught Nell the rule the old dancers all knew: at the last waltz, you breathe in what you mean to keep, and breathe out what you are done carrying.

Keep reading

Nobody believed it until the night of the harvest dance, when Tomas Vine, the fiddler, played the waltz slower than anyone had ever dared. The hall went quiet. Above the lamps, four birds came down out of the dark and wheeled over the floor, so close that Nell felt the wind of them on her cheek. Her grandmother, who had danced there at seventeen, leaned over and said they were only waiting for someone to speak first.

Nell had a letter in her apron pocket, the one from the mill saying her brother would not be coming home from the north. She had carried it since spring, folded to the size of a stamp. When the fiddle drew out its last bars she unfolded it, read the first line aloud to the rafters, and then breathed out, long and hard, the way her mother had taught her, and let the paper go.

The birds rose after it, up through the skylight, four small shapes against the stars, and the river wind came in and lifted the hem of every dress on the floor. In the morning the boards were bare. Nell swept them anyway, out of habit, and found nothing in the cracks at all.