Black and grey script reading Sometimes you have to fall before you can fly, with grey wings and two pink zebra-striped hearts on a person's side ribs.

Winged hearts with script quote on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A script quote arcs above and below a pair of grey shaded wings and two hearts, one at the top right and one at the lower left, filled with pink and black zebra-stripe patterns. The lettering uses bold black linework, while the wings are shaded in soft greys with fine feather detail. The tattoo sits across the side of the torso against light skin, with tattoo equipment visible in the blurred background.

Lettering Ribs Heart Wing Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hearts were Dot's idea, stencilled in the back of the wagon while rain drummed on the canvas. She cut the stripes from an old cornflakes box and dabbed pink paint through them, then black, until the hearts looked as if they had been dragged through a menagerie and come out better for it. Ruth held the lamp and said nothing about the wings, which had taken her a fortnight to shade in grey pencil.

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Sal, the flyer, had her doubts about the whole business. She sat on the platform steps after the afternoon rehearsal, tugging at a strap that would not lie flat, and watched the net sway below like a hammock nobody had asked to swing. 'You go up and you come down,' Dot said. 'The coming down is the bit they pay for.' Sal laughed, but she didn't mention that the net had been patched twice that week with an old tarpaulin and a prayer.

That night the crowd stamped at the drum roll and Sal climbed the ladder with the wings strapped flat beneath her spangles. At the top she looked down at the sawdust and the bulbs and the small faces tipped up towards her, and she let go before she could think better of it. The drop was longer than any rehearsal had promised. Then the net took her, sagging and springing, and somewhere in the dark the band struck up again.

In the morning Dot was on the caravan step with a fresh stencil and a tin of pink. Sal sat beside her with her boots off and a chalk pencil in her fist, writing the line along the caravan door in her careful schoolgirl hand, the letters climbing and falling the way she had learned to, one after another, until there was room for nothing else.