Black and grey tattoo on an upper back showing a shaded feather, a flock of birds and the script words Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not.

Feather, birds and quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A feather with shaded barbs sits on the left, with a flock of small birds rising from its tip towards the top right. Below the feather, the quote Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not is set in flowing script across four lines. The ink is black and grey, with fine outlines and soft shading on the feather, and the design sits diagonally across the shoulder blade area of a pale skin tone.

Lettering Back Feather Bird Flock Script Quote Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kettle had been going since five, and Nell had the bacon on before the lad came down the companionway with his kitbag already on his shoulder. "You're early," she said. "Ship's not sailing till the tide turns."

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"Couldn't sleep." Sol set the bag by the door and looked at the stove as if it might tell him something. He was nineteen and had been her galley boy for two years, peeling potatoes the wrong way and burning every tray of flapjack she ever left him alone with. Now there was a berth on a box ship out of Immingham, a proper rating's job, and he had the look of someone who had been told he could fly.

She slid two eggs onto a plate and pushed it across the steel. "Eat. Your mum will have my hide if you come home a rake." He ate with his head down. When he finished he reached into his jacket and took out a grey feather, long and cracked at the tip, and laid it on the chopping board between them. "Found it on the quay yesterday. Thought you'd want it for the shelf."

Nell turned it over. She had kept the galley shelf for thirty years with odd things from the sea: a brass tap, a cracked mug, a gull's skull. She did not tell him she had already counted the gulls over the lock gates that morning and got the number wrong twice. Outside, the first birds lifted off the mudflats in a loose, rising cloud, and she watched them until the horn sounded and he was gone up the gangway, one hand raised, not once looking back.