Black design of a feather releasing flying birds beside the script words 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 feather on the left breaks apart into a flock of birds rising towards the top right. The words Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not are set in flowing black script beside the feather. The design is drawn in solid black on a soft white, feathery background.

Lettering Blackwork Feather Bird Flying bird Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Jo, the man at the petrol station in Scarrow Wells says the road north is shut past the salt pan until the grader comes through, so I have been sitting on the bonnet of the Corolla for two hours with a flask of tea gone cold. Starlings are working the telegraph wire above the pumps. Hundreds of them. They lift all at once, thin out into nothing, then bunch back together as if they had never meant to part, and I thought of you at the departure gate with your rucksack straps twisted round your fingers.

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You said it so plainly that morning. Your wings were ready, Dad, and I said that wasn't the point, and you rolled your eyes the way you did at nine when I had got the bedtime story wrong. I wanted to tell you that my heart had been folded into that rucksack too, tucked between your jumpers, and that it would not come home until you did. I didn't say it. I drove back along the bypass with the radio off and the grey feather you left on the windowsill beside the kettle.

The grader is due at four. The woman who runs the café across the forecourt has given me a biro and a paper napkin, the only paper I could find, so forgive the state of this. When the birds come down again I will walk out to the wire and look for the one that is the colour of your hair. Write to me from wherever the wind takes you, even if it is only a postcard with a camel on it. I am putting the feather in this envelope so you know I have not kept it for myself.