Pencil sketch of a feather with flock of birds lifting away from its tip and the words Take those broken wings and learn to fly, a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Feather with birds rising and a quote

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a large feather curving from the lower left towards the upper right, with its shaft and barbs shaded in fine hatched strokes. A flock of small dark birds in flight rises from the feather's tip, and the handwritten words Take those broken wings and learn to fly follow the curve of the feather. The image is black and grey on a plain pale background, with the feather occupying most of the frame.

Realism Feather Bird Flight Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put that bucket down before you spill it, and sit where I can see your face. You want the story of the gannet that came up in the nets off Porthkennack the spring the Morwenna nearly went down? Then you'll hear it the way it happened, not the way the summer visitors tell it in the Ship with their pints.

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It was a Tuesday in March and the wind had gone round to the east like a dog that's been kicked. Young Jory Vosper was hauling the mackerel line with his father's hands, though his father lay in the Penzance infirmary with his chest. The lines came up heavy and cold, and tangled in the middle of the catch was a gannet, one wing bent back like a snapped oar. Jory reached for his knife. Old Ezra Trewhella, who had mended nets on the slip for sixty years, told him to bring it to the loft instead.

Ezra splinted that wing with ash from a cracked thole pin and strips of tarred sailcloth. He chewed pilchards soft before he fed them to it, which is a thing I never saw him do for a man. Each dawn the fleet went out, and each dawn the gannet watched them from the sill with its good wing folded. The lads said it would never lift. Ezra said a broken thing only needs someone to keep it company until it remembers the sky is still up there.

In May the splint came off. Jory carried the bird up the cliff path to Chapel Rock while the whole fleet idled on the water to watch. It stood at the edge a long while, looking down at the drop as if weighing a cold sea. Then it opened the mended wing and went out over the boats, and a flock of gulls and shearwaters lifted behind it like ink spilled upward off a page. Ezra said nothing at all, only took off his cap. Jory still keeps the single grey feather the bird dropped on the rock, pinned above the chart table, and when the wind goes east he takes it down and holds it to the window until the gulls come to the stern.