Blue silhouette birds rise from the shoulder blade, with the script lettering Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly beneath them on a person's upper back.

Flock of birds and script quote on back

Lettering · Back · Colour · Photo

A flock of about twenty bird silhouettes in blue ink trails diagonally up and away from the shoulder blade, with the wings and bodies drawn as solid shapes of varying size. Below the flock, the words Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly are set in flowing black script across two lines. The skin is photographed close up from behind, with the tattoo filling the centre of the frame.

Lettering Back Shoulder Bird Flock Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs post at Halm Ford kept its birds in a ledger, the same as it kept everything else. Sergeant Tobiah Crane had counted them every morning for eleven years, starlings mostly, sometimes swifts. Each flock had to be logged at the wire before it could cross, and each entry had to be numbered in ink, because the lieutenant in the town believed that anything not written down had not happened.

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That spring a flock came in from the east with a small grey bird at its tail, no bigger than a thumb. The others called her Wren, though she was not one. She perched on the top strand of the wire and would not go over. Marra, the old hen who led them, circled twice above her and came back to the same post. Every time she came back the flock sank lower, and every morning the sergeant wrote the number again. Twenty-one. Crane had begun to dislike the sound of it.

On the ninth morning the small bird fell. She dropped straight off the wire into the mud of the bank, wings folded like a shut umbrella, and lay with her beak open. Crane came down from the hut with his tea still in his hand, meaning to lift her out, and the flock went over the top of him in one roar of wings. He stood with the cup while they passed. When he looked down, the bird had got one foot under her and then the other, and then she was up, mud on her breast, climbing after the rest over the poplars.

He went back into the hut and opened the ledger. Under the morning's count he wrote twenty-one, and under that, in a hand he did not quite recognise as his own, he wrote fell. Then he sat for a long time without crossing anything out.