Pencil drawing of a shaded feather that breaks into a flock of birds, with the words take those broken wings and learn to fly written along it.

Feather turning into flying birds

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a feather rising diagonally from the lower left, with its quill and barbs shaded in grey tones. Small birds fly off the upper tip of the feather, shrinking as they rise toward the top right. The phrase take those broken wings and learn to fly runs in handwritten script beside the feather on a plain white background.

Feather Bird Flight Flock Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gull came through the lee porthole on a swell that threw the pans off their hooks, and by the time I had Tomas holding the colander over it, the bird was hammering its good wing against the pot rack while the bad one hung at an angle no bird should manage. Three primaries had snapped at the root. They stood out from the wing like the spokes of a broken umbrella, and each time it beat at the air another grey feather came loose and drifted down onto my flour.

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I would not let Tomas tip it over the side. Nineteen years as cook on the Ardent had taught me that a wing takes longer to mend than a sailor's temper, and that the sea is no nurse. We kept the gull in a lobster creel under the sink, where the range leaked its warmth, and fed it bread soaked in milk from a tin cup. The boy talked to it while he peeled potatoes. He told it about his mother's kitchen in Lerwick and the herring boats that used to crowd the harbour wall.

By the time we raised the Scillies the wing had set crooked, but the bird could lift itself a foot off the deck. Tomas had taken to climbing the ratlines with his arm strapped to his chest, practising a grip he had no right to need yet. One morning he came down the companionway with the creel in his good hand and the lid open. The gull stood on the rail and considered the sea for a long time. Then it dropped, hit the water, rose, and I watched it skim the swell until it found the air.

Tomas came back to the galley and set a single grey primary on the tin tray beside the bread. Neither of us picked it up. Out past the wake a dozen gulls were wheeling, and one of them wore a crooked wing like a man walking with a stick.