Black script lettering reading Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not, with a feather and flying birds, drawn on a white feathered background.

Feather, birds and script quote design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black design shows a long feather on the left with several small birds flying up and away towards the top right, beside the words Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not in flowing script. The linework is solid and bold with fine hatching on the feather, and the lettering sits in a stacked layout. The image is entirely black ink on a pale, feathery white background.

Lettering Feather Bird Script Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been up since four, breaking the ice on the trough in the top field while the ewes watch with flat, patient eyes. Frost furs the gatepost and the hawthorn hedge is a grey tangle against a sky the colour of pewter. Your sister's letter is folded in your breast pocket, the Edinburgh postmark already soft from handling. She wants you to read it at the table, not out here, but you have read it four times already and the words keep turning over like stones in a stream.

Keep reading

Back in the kitchen the kettle is already spitting on the hob. Margaret from the next farm has left a tin of shortbread and a note about the tup going lame. You tell yourself you will answer the letter after the feed round, after the lambing shed is mucked out, after the snow the radio keeps promising. The clock above the dresser ticks louder than it has any right to. Ivy was always the one who wanted the road. You were the one who held the gate open for her, every time, and never said what it cost.

At dusk the starlings come, a black smear lifting off the barn roof and folding over the stubble like a sheet shaken out. You stand at the yard wall with the empty bucket in your hand and watch them peel away east, towards the lights of the town and the train line and everything you have never gone looking for. One feather drifts down, grey-brown and barred, and lands on the wet slate by your boot. You pick it up. It weighs less than the letter, and you have not yet found a reason to be heavier.

You go in and sit at the table and slit the envelope with the bread knife. Under her careful handwriting you write one line on the back of it, in pencil, pressing hard: Go on, then. I'll keep the gate open.