Black script lettering reading Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly, with small butterflies, on a woman's shoulder and upper back.

Script quote and butterflies on a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black script quote runs diagonally across the shoulder blade and upper back, reading Sometimes you've gotta fall before you fly, with four small butterflies placed around the lettering. The linework is clean and even, with solid black ink and no shading, and the skin tone is the only colour in the photo. The camera is set behind the wearer, who is turned away, with a fairground ride blurred in the background.

Lettering Shoulder Script Quote Butterfly Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every night that October, Ada Penrose climbed the iron stairs of the Corn Exchange clock tower to watch the lamplighters work their way down Cable Street. The wind up there was never still, and the old men of Harrowgate said it carried the town's wishes up to the weathercock, where it kept them until someone was brave enough to take them back.

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She had a wish of her own, though she kept it folded small in her coat pocket. Her brother Samuel had gone to sea and not come back, and she wanted the wind to tell her whether he had learned to fly. The weathercock only creaked. So she climbed to the parapet one night when the fog lay thick as wool, the lamps below were nothing but yellow smudges, and she asked the air plainly to let her go where he had gone.

The wind did not answer. She fell. She fell past the clock face and the gilded hands and the sleeping pigeons, and somewhere between the third storey and the second she stopped being afraid, because the air beneath her held her the way water holds a stone. When she opened her eyes she was standing on the canal towpath with her hair full of wet ash and four pale moths resting on her shoulder, their wings barely moving.

The lamplighters said afterwards that the lamps along Cable Street burned blue for the rest of that night, and that a girl walked home under them with her arms half open, as though carrying something she did not want to drop. Nobody ever saw Samuel again. But the moths stayed with her, and when she was old and the town had forgotten her name, the children said the wind on Harrowgate hill still knew how to catch you if you were willing to fall.