Blue silhouette birds rise across a shoulder blade above the script words Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly, on the upper back.

Flock of birds and script on a shoulder

Lettering · Back · Colour · Photo

A flock of blue silhouetted birds sweeps diagonally from the upper left of the shoulder blade towards the centre of the back. Below them, the words Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly are written in flowing blue cursive script. The solid blue ink sits on smooth skin against a pale teal background, with a striped top visible at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Back Shoulder Bird Flock Script Quote Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ovens were already roaring when Tom Ashby dropped the tray of barley loaves on the flagstones for the third time that week. Edith Crane did not look up from her scales. She had kept the bakehouse at Holloway Mill for forty winters, and she had never once swept up a loaf for a boy who was too frightened to climb the loft.

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"Fetch the flour sacks from the loft," she said. "Starlings are roosting in the rafters. Mind the third rung, it has a hollow in it." Tom went up the ladder with his knees knocking together. The loft was dim and smelled of old flour and warm feathers. The birds were there, dozens of them, pressed against the beams like scraps of dusk. "They came with the mill," Edith called up. "My gran said a bird that never leaves the sill never learns what the air is for."

He reached the top, lost his footing on the hollow rung and dropped through the hatch. He landed square in a sack of flour and the whole cloud of it went up around him, white as a sheet pulled off a bed. Above him the birds lifted from the beams in one dark rush, and for a moment the grey window was full of wings. Tom lay there coughing and laughing until tears ran pale lines down his face.

Edith stood in the doorway with her arms folded. "Well," she said. "Now you've fallen. Get up, the dough won't wait." He did. By the time the sun came over the mill race, he had shaped the first loaf himself and scored its top with three quick cuts that spread like a flock across the crust. Edith pressed one thumb into the dough, nodded once, and said nothing at all, which from her was the highest praise going.