Fine line black script reading free with a small flying bird beside it, tattooed on the upper back below a grey top strap.

Script word free with a small bird

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black script word reading free runs diagonally across the skin, with a small solid black bird silhouette flying off the end of the final letter. The linework is fine and even, with no visible shading, and the design is rendered entirely in black ink. The grey fabric of a top sits at the left edge of the frame and the soft focus of the skin fills the background.

Fine line Lettering Back Free Bird Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad kept the finches in the back room above the shop on Kirkgate, forty cages stacked like a tenement, and every Sunday he counted them with a pencil behind his ear. I was nine the year I learned the ledger had only one word that wasn't a price. He wrote it beside the goldfinch Mrs Ackroyd had bought in March, then went over it twice in capitals he used for nothing else: FREE.

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I asked what it meant. He said a bird could be paid for twice, once in coin and once in somebody's mercy, and that the second payment was the one that counted. He wouldn't say more, so I took the ledger out to the yard and tried to work it out myself, the way you'd tackle a sum. The yard had a dead wheelbarrow and a sycamore with a crooked limb, and on the limb sat a swallow that had come down off the moor in October, long after it should have gone south.

On the last Sunday of the month I opened the back window and let the goldfinch go. It wouldn't leave the sill, so I nudged it with a finger, and it hopped onto the gutter and sat there looking at the sky as if it had forgotten how the trick was done. Dad found me in the yard with the empty cage in my hand. He didn't shout. He took the pencil from his ear, drew a small bird beside the word, and set it flying off the last letter, the way a child draws a gull.

Mrs Ackroyd came back in April wanting her money. Dad gave it to her, every penny, and told her the goldfinch had gone home. I still have that page. The ink has faded to weak tea, but you can still follow the line of the bird's going.