Black line design of a feather with a flock of birds rising above script lettering that reads Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not, on a white feathered background.

Feather and birds with script quote

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black silhouette feather sits on the left, with a flock of birds in flight rising from its tip towards the upper right. Below the birds, bold script lettering reads Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not across four lines. The design is in solid black on a pale white feathery background.

Lettering Feather Bird Wing Script Quote Flock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fulmars came back to the cliffs above Ardnish Holm the same week the ferry stopped, and Hector Gunn stood at the kitchen window counting them the way other men counted the price of diesel. Forty-one, he said, and tapped the glass. Last spring it had been fifty-three. He said it without much feeling, which was how I knew it had gone into him somewhere deep.

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I was twenty-two that summer and had been his hands on the cliff for three seasons, holding the bag while he lifted the chicks out of their scrapes and slid the steel rings over their legs. He taught me to hold a fulmar so it could not spit its stomach oil in my eye, and to talk nonsense while I did it, because the birds settled to a voice. Most of what I know about patience I learned from a bird that smelled of rotten fish and wanted nothing from me.

In October the gale took the boat shed roof and most of the washing line. Afterwards I found a single grey feather caught in the wire of the gate, stiff and clean, its tip still curled as if it had been folded around something. Hector had gone out on the rocks alone that morning. He didn't say why, and I didn't ask, because asking was the one thing he had never taught me to do well.

I took the feather up to the cliff edge, where the wind comes off the Atlantic like a shove. I opened my hand. For a moment it dropped straight, the way things do when they have given up on going anywhere, and then the air caught the vane and it lifted, turned once, and went out over the water after the birds.