Black fine-line silhouettes of flying figures and stars forming an infinity loop with the words Never and Grow Up, tattooed on the ribs.

Flying silhouettes and lettering on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Black silhouettes of flying figures, including a fairy-like figure and a small figure, sit along an infinity loop made of small star shapes. The words Never and Grow Up are written in black script within the loop. The tattoo is in black ink only, with solid fills for the figures and thinner strokes for the lettering and stars, shown on bare skin against a plain background.

Lettering Ribs Silhouette Fairy Flying figure Infinity Star Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are nine the summer the lift in Calder House gives up for good, and Dami swears the stairs are longer going up than coming down. You count the floors with your palm on the cold rail, past the crooked yellow sun someone sprayed on the third landing, past a pram with no wheels parked where nobody wants it. By the fifth floor your legs ache and the light from the stairwell window is the colour of weak tea.

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Dami has a torch with a cracked lens and a sheet of gold star stickers he took from the library. On the seventh landing he peels them off one by one and presses them to the wall in a long loop, like the sign for forever on a sweet packet. Never grow up, he says, grinning, copying his uncle. You tell him that isn't how it works. He shrugs and says it is, if you don't let it.

That night you sit at your window on the fourteenth floor. The estate lamps hum orange below and the wind leans on the glass. Your reflection hangs there with a dark shape thrown across it, arms out, like someone mid-jump, and you realise it is only the lamp behind you. Still, you lift your arms, and the shape lifts too, and for a second the stars on the stairwell wall seem to go round and round without ever reaching the end.

In the morning the lift still doesn't work and your mum is shouting up the stairwell that you'll be late. You go down all fourteen floors, past every loop of stars, and on the ground floor you find one left stuck to the handrail. You peel it off and press it to your wrist. Dami is already outside, torch switched off, waiting for you to catch up.