Black ink flash design of two birds and the lettering I am flawed if I'm not free, with swirling flourishes, shown on a white background.

Two birds and quote lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black line design on a white background shows two bird silhouettes, one at upper left and one at right, framing the words I am flawed if I'm not free. The lettering mixes a flowing script for the words I am, flawed and free with a bold capitalised NOT and small capitals for IF I'M, linked by curled flourishes. The image is solid black on white with no shading or colour.

Lettering Bird Swallow Quote Script Lettering Flourish Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boatwright's son came back from the mainland with a cage of swallows slung across his back, because the mainland paid well for small brown birds that the gentry liked to hang in their conservatories. Old Morag watched him haul it up the slipway and said nothing, which on Skerra was how you said most things.

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They did not sing that winter. The birds sat on their perch with forked tails folded and their eyes like wet coal, and the boy's mother began leaving the door open out of spite. Nothing went through it. Morag, who had once kept a gull with a broken wing for seven years, knew the look. A creature that has only ever seen bars will take them for the edge of the world.

In April she came to the cottage with a dish of wet clay and a heron's feather tucked behind her ear. She made him sit on the step with the cage between his knees. "You are not keeping them," she said. "They are keeping you. Open it, and watch what they do with the sky." He opened it. The swallows sat stupid on the sill for the length of a breath, then the first one dropped off the edge like a stone thrown into the bay, came up again shrieking, and the rest followed it out over the harbour wall.

The boy stayed on the step until the last one was a speck above the lighthouse. Then he went inside, took the cage apart with his father's hammer, and by midsummer every bar of it had become a spoke in a cartwheel that turned on the slipway, out in the open air where anyone could see it.