Dark blue-grey tattoo of a flock of birds rising across the upper back, with the script words Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly beneath them.

Flock of birds and script quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A flock of solid silhouetted birds in different wing positions rises from the left and drifts diagonally across the skin. Below them, a flowing script line reads Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly, with clean, even strokes and some soft shading. The ink is a single dark blue-grey tone on a warm skin background, and the tattoo fills the frame across the upper back.

Lettering Back Bird Flock Silhouette Script Quote Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dance floor at the Marine Pavilion smells of French chalk and spilt lemonade, and you are standing too close to Teddy Marsh, who has told you twice already that your feet are arguing with the music. Outside the tall windows the sky over the pier is filling with starlings, hundreds of them, bunching and loosening like a dropped scarf.

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'Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly,' says Mrs Pryce, who has taught the Saturday class since the war, tapping her cane on the boards to keep time. You laugh, because it sounds like something stitched on a tea towel. Then Teddy takes your hand for the promenade, you go over on your heel, and the floor meets you with a crack that stops the band mid-bar.

Nobody laughs. Teddy is pink to the ears and keeps saying sorry to the tuba. You sit on the edge of the stage with a laddered stocking and watch the starlings lift off the pier rail all at once, a black sheet shaken out and folded, then drift east over the harbour. Mrs Pryce sits down beside you and passes a pear drop from her handbag without a word.

The next Saturday you come back in flat shoes and ask for the quickstep from the top. Teddy watches from the doorway, hat in hands. When the music starts you take the first step without looking down, and past the windows the starlings turn again, all of them at once, as if they have agreed to it.