Fine line black script reading if you're a bird I'm a bird with three small bird silhouettes, tattooed on the inner wrist.

Three birds and script quote on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three small black bird silhouettes in flight sit beside a line of thin cursive script on the inner wrist. The linework is fine and the birds are solid black fills with no shading. The arm is photographed at a slight angle against a soft grey background, with the tattoo in sharp focus.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Bird Script Quote Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keep at Harrowgill had no roof left by the spring my sister and I were nine and eleven, so the swallows took it for their own. Nell said they were the only tenants in the county who paid no rent and kept the place clean. She would stand on the broken newel stair with crumbs from our mother's bread in her fist and call up to them, as if the birds were a jury she had to win over.

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The summer she turned sixteen, a man from the railway survey came up the valley with a theodolite and a tin of sandwiches, and Nell began to talk about the cities. She kept a list in the back of a hymnbook. At the bottom, in pencil pressed so hard it dented the page, she had written: if you're a bird, I'm a bird. I asked her what it meant. She said it was what you told someone when you were both leaving the same nest. I didn't understand it was a promise until she was gone.

She took the Carlisle train in September with one case and the hymnbook. I stayed in the castle with the swallows, who left a week later for Africa without any fuss. The stone held the day's warmth long after dusk, and I sat on the cold sill of the upper window counting the birds that circled over the wall.

In October three swallows came back over the ruined keep, low and fast, and one dropped a white feather onto my knee before it turned for the river. I wrote to Nell that night on the back of a seed packet. I told her the birds had come back. I did not tell her I had already started packing.