Black and grey fine line script tattoo reading Sometimes you gotta fall before you fly, with small birds in flight, on the side ribs.

Fine line quote with birds on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a handwritten script quote, Sometimes you gotta fall before you fly, with a thin arrow line leading to a group of small bird silhouettes that rise toward the right. The linework is fine and even, with the letters in black ink and no shading beyond solid fill in the birds. The photograph is black and white, showing the side of a torso with black lace lingerie above the tattoo.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Quote Bird Script Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Grandad had the loft door open before the milk float came down Harbour Street, and the first bird out was the grey hen he called Tuesday, because she was always late. She stood on the lip of the roof with her feathers puffed against the wind off the harbour and looked down into the yard as if somebody had moved it while she wasn't watching.

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"Go on, then," Grandad said, though not to me. He had his cap pushed back and a tin of seed under one arm, and he had been saying the same thing to birds for fifty years. I held the basket. Its wicker creaked against my hip. Below us the gulls were fighting over a split bag of chips outside the Co-op, and the noise came up in gusts. I wanted to tell him she wasn't going to fly, that she'd end up in the gutter with a bent wing the way the last one had. He knew that. He said it anyway.

Then she dropped. It wasn't a flutter. It was a plain fall, straight off the parapet like a stone let go from a hand, and I actually shouted. She was almost at the bins when her wings caught the air and she levelled out, then climbed, wheeling over the chimney pots until she was a grey tick against the clouds.

Grandad put his cap back on. "Sometimes you gotta fall before you fly," he said, and then, because he was Grandad, "Don't tell your nan I said that. She thinks I got it off a calendar." I took the basket inside. On the roof one grey feather was still turning on the wind, sinking slowly past the gutter toward the yard, and neither of us went down to fetch it.