Black ink flash design of a feather breaking into flying birds above the script words Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not, on a white feathery background.

Feather dissolving into birds with script quote

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing shows a feather on the left that breaks up into a flock of birds flying up and to the right. Below the birds, the words Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not are set in flowing black script with some shaded strokes. The design is in black ink only and sits on a soft white feathered background.

Lettering Feather Bird Script Quote Wing Heart

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

Dear Joe,

Keep reading

The swans came back to the bend below Hatherley lock this week, nine of them, and I counted every one before the mist swallowed the rest. You'd have wanted the number. Your dad always did, and I got into the habit of telling him things so he could hear them while he worked the tiller.

The Mary Ellen is tied up where we always leave her, nose to the willows, and the cabin roof is still scattered with the goose down you pulled from the bank the spring you were twelve. I haven't swept it. Every time the wind gets under the tarpaulin a few strands lift off and drift over the towpath, grey and white, as if they've got somewhere better to be. I stopped trying to catch them.

On Tuesday I went up to the lock keeper's cottage to pay the toll and came back to find a long grey feather caught in the stern line, the kind a heron drops. I stood on the gunwale with it in my fist for longer than the kettle would have liked. You wrote from Liverpool that your wings were ready, and I said go, because that is what a mother says when she has been practising the word for a month. I never told you my heart was still tied to that mooring rope with a knot I couldn't work loose.

So I've left the hatch open a crack and the lamp lit in the cabin. Come home when the tide is in your favour. I'll keep the feather on the tiller where you can see it from the towpath.

Love, Mam