Dark blue-black silhouettes of birds in flight rise across the upper back toward the shoulder, 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 bird silhouettes rises diagonally from the shoulder blade area across the upper back, with the birds becoming smaller as they move towards the top right. Beneath them, a line of cursive script reads Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly, set in a single dark ink. The birds are solid filled shapes in varying sizes, and the script has smooth, even strokes against smooth skin in a plain background.

Lettering Back Shoulder Bird Flock Silhouette Script Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shearwaters came off the Horn in the fourth week out, thin dark cutouts dropping low over the swell, and you stopped mid-splice to count them. Mr Pelham would have had you at the bilge pump for idling, but he was below with the chart table and the rum, and the bosun only grinned and said birds don't ask permission to pass a ship.

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Rosa, the cook's girl from Valparaíso, had told you the rhyme her grandmother used: every bird that flies has first let go of something. You had laughed at her then. Now the flock lifted off the crests and swung north-east in a long ragged arrow, and the smallest ones at the back kept dropping out of line, tumbling towards the water, then snapping upward again just above the foam.

The first mate's boy, Tom Varley, was sick over the lee rail that night, and when you found him at the bow he asked whether it hurt to fall. You told him about the Kestrel's topmast in '09 and how the men who went down it came back up with their knuckles raw, laughing. He didn't laugh. He pointed at the sky, where the birds had come round again, wheeling back towards the ship as if they had decided it was worth the trouble.

In the morning the wind backed south and the sea went flat as slate. You wrote the words down on the back of a manifest, in the careful copperplate your mother beat into you, and pinned it to the galley door for Rosa to find. Under them you sketched the flock in pencil, each bird smaller than the last, climbing off the page towards the corner where the ink ran out.