The Flight Was the Point
I Got a Tattoo of Icarus. Here's What It Means to Me.
There’s something about sitting in a tattoo chair that strips away the noise. No phone. No notifications. Just ink, skin, and whatever you’re carrying into the room with you.
My most recent tattoo is of Icarus. The Italian artist who gave it to me paused after we talked through the concept and said one word: “beautiful.” Not the design. The story. And I understood exactly what he meant. There is something beautiful about a boy who flew.
Most people hear the name Icarus and think: cautionary tale. Don’t fly too high. Don’t get too close to the sun. Stay in your lane. When I look at Icarus, I see someone who actually flew. Someone who had the courage to leave the ground at all. The fall is part of the story, yes. But so is the flight.
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph. — Jack Gilbert, Failing and Flying
I didn’t plan my sleeve. I built it as life gave me reasons to. But when I look at all three pieces together now, I realize they were never random. They were a conversation I was having with myself, one chapter at a time.
The first piece I got was Amor Fati. A Latin phrase that translates to “love of fate,” rooted in Stoic philosophy and later carried forward by Nietzsche. The idea is simple in principle and genuinely hard in practice: don’t just accept what happens to you. Love it. Find a way to see everything, even the painful things, as part of something necessary. It doesn’t mean pretending nothing hurts. It means refusing to let what you can’t control become the thing that controls you.
I got that tattoo about a year after one of the more significant transitions of my life. I had been running my own business and at a certain point I walked away from it to take a job. That was a complicated season. There was grief in it. There was also relief. And there was a version of me that needed a reminder that the story wasn’t over just because that chapter was.
The second piece was Memento Mori. Remember death. I know how that sounds, but it was never meant to be dark. It was meant to be honest. The Stoics carried this phrase as a daily practice because they understood something most of us spend our whole lives avoiding: time is the only resource you can’t get back. When you remember that the clock is running, trivial things stop mattering so much. The comparison. The pettiness. The time you waste waiting to feel ready. Memento Mori sits on my arm as a reminder to stay intentional. Not to create anxiety, but to create urgency. The kind of urgency that makes you stop tolerating things that don’t deserve your time.
So when I sat down to get Icarus, I already had two pieces that were really about the same thing: accepting reality and not wasting the life you have inside of it. What I didn’t have was the piece about what to actually do with that.
Here’s where I want to push back on how most people read the myth.
Icarus didn’t fail because he was ambitious. He failed because he stopped listening. His father Daedalus, the craftsman who built the wings, gave him clear instructions: don’t fly too low, the sea will weigh the feathers down. Don’t fly too high, the sun will melt the wax. Stay in the middle. Trust the craft. Icarus didn’t crash because he wanted to fly. He crashed because he forgot what made the flight possible in the first place.
I lived a version of this, and I think most people who have built something from nothing have too.
When my business was at its peak, money was coming in at a level I hadn’t experienced before. Things were clicking. I had clients, income, momentum. And for a period of time, I let that success quietly start to change something in me. I was carrying a pride I wasn’t fully aware of. A quiet sense that I had figured something out that others hadn’t. That I was above the ground in a way that made the ground feel like it was for other people.
I didn’t catch it right away. That’s the thing about ego. It doesn’t announce itself. It just slowly starts making decisions for you. Looking back, I can see exactly where the wax started to soften. It didn’t feel like arrogance at the time. It felt like confidence. It felt like I had earned the altitude.
And in some ways, I had. The flight was real. The work was real. The results were real. But the moment you start believing the wings will hold no matter what you do, no matter how you behave, no matter how far you push it, you’ve already started to fall. Not because ambition is dangerous. Because ego makes you forget the mechanics that got you off the ground.
That’s what Icarus means to me. Not a warning against reaching. A reminder to respect the craft that makes reaching possible. The discipline, the self-awareness, the willingness to stay honest about where you actually are. Those are the wings. Ego is the heat.
When I look at my arm now, the three pieces tell one story.
Amor Fati says: love what is, including the hard parts, including the parts you didn’t choose.
Memento Mori says: you don’t have unlimited time, so stop spending it on things that don’t matter.
And Icarus says: when you get the chance to fly, and you will get the chance, make sure it’s the craft keeping you in the air and not just the feeling of being high up.
I didn’t design a philosophy and then illustrate it. I lived through things, felt them, learned from them, and slowly found the words for what they taught me. The tattoos came after. They were my way of putting ink to lessons I didn’t want to forget.
The Italian artist called it beautiful. I think I understand that more now than I did sitting in the chair. The story of Icarus is beautiful not because he fell. It’s beautiful because he flew at all. Because somewhere, a boy who had never left the ground looked up at the sky and decided the attempt was worth the risk.
That’s what I want to carry with me. Not a fear of flying too high. Just enough wisdom to know what’s holding me up, and enough humility to protect it.
The flight is always worth it. The only question is whether you’re maintaining the wings.
If this one landed for you, restack it and help it find someone who needs it.
And I’ll leave you with this: where in your life right now are you flying, and where is the wax starting to soften?
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