Blue silhouette birds rise in a flock above the script words Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly, tattooed across the upper back.

Flock of birds and script quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Colour · Photo

A flock of blue silhouetted birds in varying sizes and angles rises diagonally from the upper back toward the shoulder blade. Below them, a black cursive script reads Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly. The solid blue fills and crisp script edges sit on smooth skin against a plain, softly lit background.

Lettering Back Bird Flock Silhouette Script Quote Flying

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rooks came back to Hollin Edge every March, and my grandmother said they remembered who had fed them. I was nine the spring I climbed the old ash behind the mill to reach a nest, and the bough gave way under me like wet bread. I went down through the branches with my arms out, and the sound I made was not a scream but a kind of surprised hiccup.

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I landed in the bracken, not dead, only furious, with a grazed palm and a torn sleeve. Mr Aske from the mill came running with his cap in his hand, and behind him the whole sky seemed to lift. The rooks had been sitting in the ash and now they rose all at once, thirty or more of them, black against the grey, and they wheeled over the field in a long slanting river before settling back on the wall.

My grandmother sat me on the step and cleaned the grit from my palm with vinegar that made me yelp. She said I had fallen the way every young thing falls, badly and in public, and that the sensible ones only get up once they have made their peace with the ground. I asked her what she meant, and she tipped her head at the rooks, which had gone quiet on the wall and were watching us with their heads cocked.

The next spring I climbed again, lower this time, to the fork my fall had taught me to read. I did not reach the nest. I reached the lowest branch, looked up through the new leaves at the birds, and let go. I flew, badly, for about four strides before the grass came up to meet me, and Mr Aske clapped from the gate. The rooks lifted over the field, and I counted them as they went.