Pencil sketch design of a shaded feather with a flock of birds rising from its tip and the script words sometimes you gotta fall before you fly along its length.

Feather with birds and script quote

Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of a feather curving upwards from the bottom left of the frame, with a flock of small birds rising from its tip towards the top right. The feather is rendered with fine hatched strokes and soft grey shading, and the birds are drawn in simple dark silhouettes. The cursive script phrase runs diagonally across the feather on a plain white background.

Feather Bird Flock Flight Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third stair, it gives under you, same as it did the summer your great-uncle tried to carry a piano up it. Sit by the window where the sea can keep an eye on you. You want the feather story or the one about the cat? Feather first. Everybody wants the feather.

Keep reading

There was a lodger called Ada Pim who came to us the autumn her father's crab boat failed to come back past the breakwater. She took the back attic and didn't come down for meals for a fortnight. When she did come down, she had a habit. Every morning she walked the shingle and came back with one grey gull's feather, long as your forearm and curved like a wave about to break, and she laid it on her windowsill. By Christmas there were eleven, lined up like oars.

On the first warm day of spring she carried the twelfth up to the headland. I followed as far as the gorse, which is as far as my knees allowed. She stood right on the edge where the grass goes thin and held the feather flat on her palm. Then she opened her hand. It dropped, quick as a stone, and my heart went down with it. Then the wind off the water caught the vane and turned it over, and out of the gorse behind me came a flock of small dark birds, rising in a rush, going up after that feather as if they'd been waiting all winter to be asked.

She came down that evening with sand in her boots and the sill was bare. I never asked where the feather went, and I still don't know. But she ate her supper with both hands, and that's the end of the feather story, so pass me the teapot.