Black silhouette design of birds lifting from a feather above the script words Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not, on a white feathered background.

Feather and flying birds with script quote

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black silhouette design shows a long feather on the left with a flock of birds rising from its tip toward the upper right. The quote Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not runs beneath the birds in flowing script. The design is solid black on a pale, soft white feathered background, with the feather and birds in bold silhouette and the lettering in fine, looping strokes.

Lettering Feather Bird Flight Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tam,

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The starlings came over the chapel roof again this morning, a loose handful of them thrown up off the bent grass, and I stood at the byre door with the bucket going cold in my hand and counted them the way you used to, ten at a time, before you lost your place and started over. Mrs Gunn says they're heading south for the winter and I should stop feeling sorry for them. I told her I wasn't feeling sorry for anybody.

The ferry was late on Tuesday, so the post came in the same sack as the tea and the paraffin, and your letter was in it with the picture of the lake on the front. I read it three times at the kitchen table while the kettle boiled dry. You say the work at the mill is hard but the men are decent, and you asked whether I'd be coming over in the spring. You asked it the way you used to ask if I wanted the last oatcake.

I found a feather on the path to the pier, long and grey with black bars across it, and I put it in the tide book where I keep the page for March. Father said once that a wing is only a promise a bird makes to the sky, and the sky never asks for it back. I think that's what frightens me. I could go, and be fine, and the island would carry on being the island without me in it.

So I'm sending you the feather. Hold it up to the window and you'll see the light comes straight through it, which is the nearest I can manage to saying I haven't decided yet, and that I am still here.

Your loving sister, Nell