Black ink lettering design of a feather and a flock of birds beside the script words Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not, on a white feathered background.

Feather, birds and script quote design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a feather runs down the left side, with a flock of birds in flight rising from its tip towards the upper right. The script text Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not sits in the centre and lower right in black ink. The design is monochrome against a pale, soft white feathered background.

Lettering Feather Bird Wing Script Quote Text Flock

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, boy, the fire is only half lit and the wind has found the gap under the refectory door again. You want the story of the dovecote? Then hush and listen, because Brother Oswin never told it twice and I will not either.

Keep reading

Oswin kept the doves at Saint Brannoc's, out on the fen where the eels come up the drains in March. He had a grey hen called Thrift, the finest flier he ever bred. Each morning he slid back the little shutter and she sat on the sill, turning her head as though she were reading the sky. The prior said she should be sold at the market in Ely, since a bird who never leaves the wall is no use to anyone. Oswin said nothing. He only scattered another handful of barley and kept the shutter closed a while longer.

One spring the wind swung round to the west and the reeds lay flat as combed hair. Thrift went up off the sill like a thrown stone and did not come down. Oswin stood in the wet with his hands empty for a long time. Brother Anselm, who was younger then and had more opinions, came out with a lantern and found him still there. He said the bird had gone to better country. Oswin looked at the grey sky and said, "Her wings were ready. It was my heart that was not."

Years on, when the roof had been mended twice, a feather turned up caught in the gutter after a storm. Oswin pressed it flat and laid it in the psalter at the page where the old words say not one sparrow falls without notice. He never went out on the fen to look for her. He just left the shutter open every morning, and every morning something grey went over the reeds without landing.