Black fine line script reading Sometimes you gotta fall before you fly, with black bird silhouettes and a shaded purple feather on a person's upper back.

Birds, feather and script quote on a back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

A script quote runs across the upper back, with black silhouetted birds rising from the left and a large feather on the right. The feather has fine outline linework with purple and grey shading, while the birds and lettering are solid black. The image is a close, evenly lit photo of the tattoo on skin.

Lettering Back Bird Feather Script Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first thing the gulls taught me was that they never waited for the boat to stop. We were four hours out of Lowestoft with the nets still hauling, and I was twenty and certain I knew how a deck ought to be kept. Skipper Mags Heald stood by the gurdy with her thermos and watched me slide the length of the wet plates on my backside, oilskin full of North Sea.

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I came up spitting brine and laughing, which was the wrong thing to do, because she laughed too. 'Sometimes you gotta fall,' she said, and tossed me a rag. 'Fall before you fly, Tobias. Everyone on this boat did it at least once.'

Over the next week the trawler became a kind of school. I learned to read the swell from the way the birds sat on it, to tie a bowline without looking, to let the cod go when the trawl was too heavy for the winch. Mags kept a gannet feather wedged in the wheelhouse ledge, one that had come down on the foredeck in the dark. Nobody in the fleet, she said, got anywhere without first going into the water.

On the last morning the gulls lifted off the rail all at once, like someone shaking out a sheet. I stood at the bow with my stiff hands in my pockets and watched them climb. Mags tapped the glass with the feather, said nothing, and turned the wheel for home.