Fine black script reading 'Think of the happiest things, it's the same as having wings' with red and black stars on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Script quote with stars across upper back

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a person's upper back showing a fine black script quote, reading 'Think of the happiest things, it's the same as having wings', set across the shoulder blade. Scattered black and red stars and dots drift upward from the lettering, with a red curved stroke above them. The skin is smooth and evenly lit against a dark background, with the lettering in sharp focus.

Fine line Lettering Back Quote Script Star Sparkle Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't look at me like that, I'm getting to the flyer, and you'll have your tea when I'm done. Her name was Nell Carbery, and she had been forty years up a rope before anybody thought to ask her knees how they felt about it. By that last winter Marlowe and Sons Travelling Wonder had shrunk to four wagons, one elephant who would only eat on Thursdays, and a big top with more patches than canvas.

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Every night she climbed to the platform above the sawdust, and every night the cold came up through the boards and found her ankles. The clowns had stopped laughing at their own jokes. Old Marlowe sold the good lamps to a fairground in Hull and kept the brass bell for himself, ringing it at nobody. Nell kept only a tin of red greasepaint, the kind she used to dot across her cheeks for luck, and a line of words copied out on the back of a playbill, the ones her mother had read to her from a book about a boy who would not grow up.

Tobias, the owner's grandson, was nine and sharp as a pin, and he asked her one night how she could still fly if the rope was frayed. She told him the trick was the happiest things, that thinking of them was the same as having wings, and that a body could be heavy as a barrel and still go up. He didn't believe her. So on the last night of the season, with half a crowd and the bell silent, she climbed higher than she had in years, dotted the red paint along her throat, and let go.

She didn't fall. The lamps were out and nobody could say for certain what happened next, only that when the tent came down in the morning, the mud flats were full of tiny red sparks caught in the grass. Tobias swore they were hers, and I have never once told him he was wrong.