Black and grey fine line script and a shaded feather with small birds tattooed on the ribs.

Feather and script on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey feather is shaded with soft tonal gradients, with a handful of small birds drifting off from its tip. Above it, a cursive script reads Take these broken wings and learn to, running across the ribs. The fine script and realistic shading sit centrally against the skin, with the lower half of the composition cut off by the frame.

Lettering Realism Ribs Feather Script Bird Quote Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The horse had gone lame below Crake Lock, so Mab Tully put her own shoulder to the towpath rope and hauled the barge Sparrowhawk the last mile to Dunmere herself. Her father had taught her that a barge would go where the water let it and no further, and she had never believed him until that wet March.

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At the Dunmere basin an old lock-keeper named Ezra Pell sat on his step mending a fishing net. He watched her tie off and said nothing for a long while. Then he reached into the mesh and drew out a grey heron's flight feather, long as a man's forearm, caught among the knots. 'Yours,' he said. 'It came down the cut ahead of you. Something in the reeds was shedding its good parts.'

Mab turned it over. The quill was cracked near the base and the vane had split into a ragged fan. She thought of the mule, of her father's back bent over the tiller, of the boats she had seen go under at Crake Lock in the flood years.

Pell tapped the feather against his knee. 'Take these broken wings,' he said, 'and learn to.' He stopped there, slow with his hip, and looked at the water. 'Well. Finish it yourself.' He went back inside. Mab tucked the feather into the brass band of her cap and walked the rope home along the bank, and somewhere ahead of her a scatter of small birds lifted from the willows and dropped away over the cut.