Blue-black silhouettes of birds in flight rise across a shoulder blade above a line of cursive lettering that reads Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly.

Bird flock and quote on a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A flock of around twenty bird silhouettes rises diagonally from the upper back toward the shoulder, with the birds larger and more solid at the lower edge and smaller and more scattered towards the top left. Below them, a line of cursive script in dark ink reads Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly, set across two lines with clean, even strokes. The ink is a dark blue-black on light skin, shot close up against a blurred blue background with striped fabric visible at the lower right.

Lettering Shoulder Back Bird Flock Silhouette Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had kept the village off the fields for three days, so the old women sat under the threshing shed and told the children what the birds knew. The swallows that nested in the granary eaves, Hanno's grandmother said, would not leave for the south until one of their young was fool enough to fall. Tamar was nine and sick of being told what she could not do. She said she would be the fool.

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She climbed the granary ladder at first light while the swallows muttered in the thatch above her. The drop was longer than she had reckoned. Her arms flapped uselessly, and she struck the threshing floor hard enough to knock the breath from her and lay staring up while the flock wheeled over the roof with a sound like cloth being shaken out. Hanno's grandmother came across with a cup of sour milk, sat down in the dust beside her, and did not say I told you so.

"That was the falling part," she said. "Now get up."

Tamar got up. Her knee was bleeding and her palms were grazed raw, but the birds had not gone. They were lifting off the ridge one at a time, dropping a hand's width and catching the air beneath them, and by midday she understood that every one of them had fallen like that before it learned to stay up.

That evening she climbed the ladder again and did not jump. She waited until the flock began to tip from the eaves, then went with them, arms out and certain this time, and the whole grey cloud of them poured over the hills towards the sea while she ran below, shouting until the wind took her voice.