Black and grey script lettering reading Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today, with a feather and a bird above it, across a man's upper back.

Script quote with feather across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a man's upper back showing a large script quote reading Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today. A feather hangs down the centre beneath the lettering, and a stylised bird or wings sit above the text. The work is in black ink with soft grey shading, and the lettering is the dominant element against blurred, pale skin.

Lettering Back Script Quote Feather Bird Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell came up my stairs at nine on a wet Thursday with a shoebox under one arm and a demand that I write to her husband, who had been dead eleven years. I told her the post did not run that way. She put the box on my desk and opened it anyway. Inside, under tissue, lay a dead swift and a single grey feather, and a card with three words in her careful hand: tell him yes.

Keep reading

I am a scrivener by trade, which means I write what other people cannot quite manage, usually for a penny a line and a cup of tea. Swifts never land, you know. They eat and drink and sleep on the wing, and they come down only to nest in the church tower across from my window. The bird in the box had dropped into the gutter outside my door in July. I had watched it struggle from behind the glass, and I had not gone out.

I wrote the letter she asked for. It said what she told me to say, which was very little, and I signed it in my best copperplate with the old flourish under the capitals. Then I sat with the quill and wrote the line I had been carrying about since I was a boy in my uncle's print shop: dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today. Printers put such things on calendars. I had never thought it would sound so true in an empty room.

Mrs Pell read the letter at my window and laughed the way you laugh at a joke that has taken a long road to reach you. She left the feather on my sill, and I kept it. Every August since, when the tower goes quiet and the swifts have gone south, I open the window, look at the grey sky, write one line to nobody, sign it, and let it go.