Black script tattoo reading 'to thine own self be true' with a small bird beside it, on the inner wrist, worn with stacked silver bangles.

Script quote with a small bird on the wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a handwritten-style script quote, 'to thine own self be true', across the inner wrist, with a small bird shape at the end of the second line. The linework is slightly uneven and the ink is a single dark tone with no shading. Stacked silver bangles and a denim sleeve sit around the wrist against a plain, dim background.

Lettering Forearm Quote Script Bird Wrist Bangle

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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

Brother Anselm had the ink pot in one hand and the rule book in the other when the swallow came through the open shutter, and I thought at first it was a sign of rain. It circled the scriptorium twice, dropped onto the lectern beside the psalter I was meant to be finishing, and sat there with its tail flicking as though it had been sent with a message of its own.

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Prior Edwin had ordered every page checked against the abbey's old copy before it went to the binder. I had spent three days on a single line of Polonius, a sentence a travelling player had once shouted across a tavern floor and that some clerk had later copied into our library, because the librarian liked a good maxim. The line was simple enough: to thine own self be true. My hand kept sloping the letters as if the words were leaning away from me.

The bird hopped nearer the wet page and I held my breath. Then it pecked once at the pot, sending a dark spot across the margin, and I laughed aloud, which earned a glare from the brother at the next desk.

I left the blot where it fell. When Edwin came to inspect, he frowned at the smudge, then at the ink-stained feather pressed into the corner, then at me. "Honest error," he said, and passed on. I have copied that line a hundred times since, always with a small bird at the end of it, because a man should be allowed one truth he did not plan.