Black and grey tattoo of a feather dissolving into a flock of birds, with the script line Sometimes when you fall, you fly, on the side of the ribs.

Feather and birds with script on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large black feather tapers diagonally across the side of the ribs, its quill and barbs shaded in smooth grey tones. A flock of small birds rises from the feather's upper edge and fades into the skin towards the top of the frame. A curved cursive line beneath the feather reads Sometimes when you fall, you fly.

Realism Lettering Ribs Feather Bird Flight Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The goats would not come down before the storm, so Tamsin Oyelaran was sent up the glass ridge with a rope, a tin of water and his aunt's warning that nobody climbed past the third bell. The towers up there had been a city once, the old people said, and they still stood like the ribs of something dead in a riverbed. He counted his steps against the grey sky. At the top, lying across a cracked lens, he found a black feather as long as his arm, its barbs stiff with dust and quiet as a folded letter.

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He lifted it, and the ridge answered. Small birds rose out of the rubble at the feather's edge, a dozen, then forty, wheeling so close he felt their wind on his cheek. They did not cry. He stood with the quill in his fist, and the ground gave way under the lens with a sound like a sigh, and he went down through the glass with the rope snapping behind him like a wet sail.

He did not fall the way stones fall. The feather opened in his hand, every barb lifting, and the birds gathered beneath him, catching his coat, his elbows, the back of his neck, until the drop became a long slow tilt over the salt pan. He came down among the goats with a hard bump and a laugh he could not stop. His aunt found him sitting in the dust with the feather across his knees, and she did not scold him. She only said the words her own mother had said to her: sometimes when you fall, you fly.

The feather hangs now above the goat-shed door. On clear mornings the flock comes down off the ridge to take crumbs from the boy's palm, and nobody in the village is surprised any more when Tamsin walks up the glass at dawn to count them.