Black tattoo of a flock of birds rising over the script line Sometimes you're gotta fall before you fly, on a person's upper back and shoulder.

Bird flock and script quote across a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A flock of about twenty birds in solid black ink rises from the shoulder blade towards the top left of the frame, with the birds shown in varied silhouette and wing positions. Below them, a flowing cursive script reads Sometimes you're gotta fall before you fly, set diagonally across the upper back. The tattoo is entirely black ink with no colour, photographed in soft natural light against a plain teal background.

Lettering Shoulder Back Bird Flock Script Quote Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at the Lenz bridge turned my passport over twice, as though the back might say something the front had refused to. Behind me a coach of schoolchildren sang to pass the time, and beyond the barrier the river ran the colour of strong tea under a sky crowded with starlings. My sister had told me to watch the birds at borders. She said flocks never filed paperwork and never asked which bank they belonged to.

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I carried one bag, a letter from a lawyer in Tarnow I could not fully read, and the name of a bakery on the far side where a cousin might still be kneading dough before dawn. The officer asked what I did for work. I told her I drew birds, the kind people wanted inked somewhere they could carry them. She laughed, the first warmth since the car, and asked me to draw one on the back of the form. It took four strokes: a wing lifted against the light, a second bird folding its tips behind it.

She studied the sketch for a long time. Then she said the pen had been giving her trouble all morning and she had never once managed to draw anything she liked with it, and she did not say it unkindly. She stamped the page with a plain blue circle and slid the passport back under the glass. The barrier arm rose with a groan. I had been dreading this moment for three years, the one where I had to step off the kerb with nothing under my feet but the hope that the ground was there.

I stepped. The gravel gave a little, the way ground does when it is not quite sure of you, and then it held. Above the bridge the starlings broke apart and tipped into a wide black ribbon, and for a moment I could not tell which of them had been me.