Black fine-line script tattoo reading sometimes you have to fall before you fly, running across the outer thigh below denim cut-off shorts.

Script quote along a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a thigh showing a handwritten script quote in black ink, reading sometimes you have to fall before you fly across two lines. The lines are thin and even with a consistent, flowing stroke and no shading. The skin sits against white denim cut-offs and a red and blue checked shirt, with a chain-link fence softly blurred behind.

Lettering Fine line Thigh Script Quote Handwriting Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the wind has been at the chimney for three days and Mother has stopped pretending she can sleep through it. I found your letter in the tin with the broken clasp, the one you wrote from Valparaiso and never posted, and I have read it four times. You said you were not frightened of the rigging. You were frightened of the topgallant yard, and that is nothing to be ashamed of.

Keep reading

Father used to chalk it on the board above the net sheds every Sunday so the crab men could read it with their tea: sometimes you have to fall before you fly. He meant the boats going down the slipway, I think, and not the gulls, though the gulls took it up as well. The chalk came off in the autumn rain and nobody rewrote it, so I have been carrying the words about like a stone in a coat pocket.

The Marguerite came in on Thursday with her foremast split and a new man at the wheel, and the bosun asked after you by name. He said you had gone up the ratlines in a squall off the Horn and not come down for an hour, and that the old hands had given you a nickname I will not put in a letter to Mother. I laughed until I had to sit on the step.

So come home when the cargo is sold, or don't, but send word first. I have kept the slate from the back of the shed. It sits in the front window now with the letters gone faint, and every morning I wipe the dust off it with my sleeve so the gulls can see it from the wall. Your loving sister, Ada.