Black script reading dare to dream on a sepia background, with a feather at the bottom left that breaks up into flying birds towards the top right.

Dare to dream script with feather and birds

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows the words dare to dream in bold black script, stacked over three lines. A feather at the lower left dissolves into a scatter of silhouetted birds rising towards the upper right. The sepia background and soft shading give it a vintage feel, with the lettering and bird shapes in solid black and the feather in fine grey detail.

Lettering Script Feather Bird Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The starlings come off the Bramley trees all at once, the way they always do in the last week of August, as if someone has shaken the whole orchard like a sheet. You are standing under the third row with a bushel basket on your hip and the grass still warm through your boots, and you have not picked a single apple since dinner. Your brother's van is idling in the lane. Your father is in the kitchen with the radio on, reading the shipping forecast to the kettle.

Keep reading

Nan kept a drawer of feathers from the hens she had outlived, and when you were nine she gave you a grey one from the bottom of it, its quill split, and told you a feather only lifts what it is willing to let go of. You didn't understand her. You kept it anyway, pressed inside the atlas on the shelf above your bed, and by the time the letter came from the college in Leeds it had gone soft and brown at the edges, like a page left too long in the sun.

Now you hold the basket against your ribs and watch the birds pour up over the hedge in a black ribbon, folding and unfolding, until one of them peels off from the rest and dips towards the lane. The van horn sounds twice. You set the basket down in the grass beside the ladder, full to the rim with fruit you were meant to sell, and walk towards the gate. You are not running. Running would make it a decision, and you have not decided anything yet, though the feather is already folded in your coat pocket.