Black script quote with a flock of small bird silhouettes tattooed along the side of the ribs, photographed from the side.

Bird silhouettes and quote on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black script quote reads 'The first step is the one you believe in' and 'The second one might be profound' across the side of the ribs, with a flock of small bird silhouettes flying above the text. The lettering uses a flowing, slightly uneven cursive with fairly bold strokes, and the birds are solid black shapes of varying sizes. The image is in black ink only, shown from a close side angle with the skin lit softly and the top of the torso cropped out of frame.

Lettering Ribs Bird Quote Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, the wind up at Hollin Gap has big ears and a long memory. Last February a carter named Tobias Penrose stood on the lip of the pass with his mule dead in the drifts behind him and asked me which way was down. I told him the ledge ahead was the only road, three paces of rock no wider than a loaf, and that the first step was the one that counted.

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He laughed the way men laugh when they are frightened. He put his boot out, then drew it back. Above us a flock of geese came over low and black against the grey, calling to each other as if they had a map between them. Penrose watched them until they were specks over the far ridge. "The first step is the one you believe in," I said, "and the second one might be profound." He did not know what I meant, and I did not explain, because a man only learns that sort of thing with his own feet.

He took the first step. The rock held. The second step gave, and he went sideways, grabbing a rowan root with both hands, and hung there cursing the goats and his own grandmother. I hauled him up by the collar. He sat in the snow with his face in his hands, and I thought he was crying, but he was laughing again, all the way down to the inn.

Next spring he came back up with a girl on his shoulders and a pencil drawing of geese folded in his coat. He asked whether I knew anyone who could put words on skin so they would last. I said I did not. But the birds still cross the pass every autumn, low and loud, and I have decided, for the sake of the story, that Penrose's words are flying with them.