Black and grey tattoo on a forearm showing a solid bat emblem between two lines of rotated lettering, one reading why do we fall and the other so we can learn to pick ourselves up.

Bat emblem and quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo on the inner forearm shows a solid black bat silhouette in the centre, with two lines of lettering running vertically along the skin on either side. The left line reads why do we fall, and the right line reads so we can learn to pick ourselves up, both in a clean sans-serif style. The photograph is taken straight on against a plain light background, with the arm filling most of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Bat Quote Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shuffle in, the lot of you, and mind the guy ropes, they're the only thing in this county still holding up. You want the story of the Halloran Brothers, and I'll give it you straight, though my knees would rather I sat. Summer of nineteen fifty-one, the wind came off the Malvern Hills and tore the back half of our big top into a hawthorn hedge. Nobody died. The money did.

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Teodor Vance was the last flyer we had, and he had no net that night, because the net had gone to pay the coal man. He climbed anyway. Halfway across the wire a gust caught the rigging and he dropped like a sack of meal into the sawdust. Silas, our ringmaster, ran out with a lantern expecting a funeral. Teodor lay there staring up at the rafters and asked him, in a quite ordinary voice, why do we fall. Silas said he had no idea, and that a man with a question like that ought to get up and go find out.

Teodor got up. The doctor said he'd never fly again, so he sat in the box office all winter with a needle and a bolt of black tarpaulin, cutting a bat for the front of the banner. He said a bat is the one creature that lets go of the branch before it knows where it will land, and it does fine. He stitched the words underneath in white thread, and Silas told him they were too long for a banner, and Teodor said a falling man has time for long sentences.

The show folded in the spring. The banner went to a jumble sale in Hereford, and a girl bought it for a shilling and sewed it onto her satchel. Forty years later she walked into our winter quarters with the stitching still legible and asked whether anyone had heard of the flyer who fell. I told her I had heard it told.