Balance script on upper back
Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo
A photograph from behind shows a person with blonde hair, with the word balance tattooed in small, thin black cursive on the upper back between the shoulder blades. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the skin tone is warm. The word sits near the centre of the frame against a plain back, with a blurred background of hair and a wall with pinned pictures at the top right.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Your mother would have hated the wind on the wire at Scarborough, so I never told her how often I walked it. Keep your weight over the ball of the foot, not the heel, and never look at the crowd. Look at the far pole, which does not care whether you fall.
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The summer the fair came to Bridlington, a boy in a grey coat shouted that I would be dead by Michaelmas. I did not answer him. I counted the paces, twenty-two from the left pole to the right, and I thought of the word my father had pencilled inside the lid of his toolbox. He wrote it small, the way a man writes what he expects to forget, and it has been there ever since.
Halfway across, a gust took my parasol and the wire sang under me like a struck bell. I did not reach for anything. I let the left arm go high and the right arm drop, and I let the whole of me lean toward the nothing until the nothing became ground I could stand on.
So when you ask me how I stayed up there, I have only this to say. Stop trying to be still. Stillness is what the wire wants from you. Lean, then lean back, and keep leaning until the leaning is the same thing as standing. The pencil word is still in the toolbox if you care to look. It is yours now. Mind the damp in the top drawer.
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