Blue-ink tattoo of a flock of birds rising above the words Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly, across a person's upper back.

Flock of birds and script on upper back

Lettering · Back · Colour · Photo

A flock of silhouetted birds in dark blue ink flies diagonally from the shoulder blade towards the upper back, with the birds shrinking in size as they rise. Below them, the cursive script reads Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly, set in a flowing hand with smooth, solid strokes. The photograph is taken from behind and shows only the back and a strap of clothing, with a plain blue-grey background.

Lettering Back Bird Flock Script Quote Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your collars up, the lot of you, the rain isn't going to ask permission. Gather in by the eel stall where the awning still holds. Right. This is about the Pell boy and the starlings of Cutler's Yard, and I'll say it once because my knees are worse than my memory.

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Young Tomas Pell lived above the cattle pens, and every dusk he sat on the edge of the hayloft with his boots dangling, watching the starlings pour over the market roofs. Big flocks at first, then they'd split into smaller ones and shrink away over the chimneys until they were pepper on the grey. He wanted to be one of them. His mother told him a boy is no bird, and he told her a bird is only a boy who hasn't been told yet. So he practised. He jumped off the bale stack into the straw, again and again, and every time he came up spitting chaff while the flock went on without him.

One November the fog came down thick as porridge, and the starlings lost each other. A dozen of them dropped into the gutters, and Tomas found one under his father's fish trestle with a wing bent the wrong way. He cupped it in both hands, and he carried it up the ladder to a shoebox beside the stove. It took a week to mend. On the seventh morning he opened the loft door and the bird dropped like a stone, then caught the air at the last moment and rose, smaller and smaller, until it was a speck over the chimneys and nobody in the yard was looking up but him.

So that's the Pell boy. He grew into a poor fisherman and a fine sign-writer, and they say he painted his letters on a ladder for forty years without once looking down. Now, who's buying the last of the mackerel? Mind the puddle by the crates, it's deeper than it looks.