Black script tattoo on a person's upper back reading Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not, with a feather and a flock of birds rising from it.

Feather and birds with script quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo across the upper back shows a feather on the left with a flock of flying bird silhouettes rising from its tip. Four lines of cursive lettering run beneath the birds, reading Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not. The work is black and grey with solid fills on the feather and birds, and the text sits centrally with the feather balancing the left side of the composition.

Lettering Back Feather Bird Flock Script Quote Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The squabs were fledging all at once that spring, the way they do after a wet April, and by the Tuesday I could not pretend the loft was still full. Brother Aldous had counted eleven on the boards that morning, flapping at the ledges and knocking dust from the rafters. I stood in the cold doorway with the bucket of barley, and my hands would not go to the bolt.

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Forty years I have kept these birds at St Brannoc's on the Scarrow cliffs. The abbot says a keeper's work is to make himself unnecessary, and I have always agreed with him in chapter and disagreed with him in the loft. I have hand-fed every one of them, held them to the light to check their keels, and I know which one bites and which one sulks. The grey hen with the torn left foot was the first to test her wings. She went off the sill like a dropped glove, caught the wind over the herb garden, and did not come back to me. I stood with the bucket and felt foolish, and then I felt something else.

That evening I found a single grey primary on the window ledge, bent at the quill. I had no use for it, so I laid it in my psalter at the hundred and thirty-ninth psalm, where the verse about taking the wings of the morning sits. The page has yellowed but the feather has not.

In the morning the loft was quiet, and the sky over the cliffs was full of small dark shapes turning like ash. I opened the hatch and let the rest go, one by one, and when the last of them went I stayed on the step until the cold got into my knees. Brother Aldous brought me tea. He did not ask. He only set it down beside me and looked up with me at the birds.