Pencil sketch design of a feather with small birds lifting off from its tip and a line of script beneath reading take those broken wings and learn to fly.

Feather with birds taking flight sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A black pencil drawing shows a long feather curving up from the bottom left, with a central quill and shaded barbs. Several small birds in flight break away from the upper tip, with one larger bird at the top right. A line of handwritten script runs along the feather's edge, reading take those broken wings and learn to fly.

Feather Bird Flight Script Quote Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is nearly out and I'll not waste the oil on you. You want the one about the gull-keeper's daughter, the one who built wings from feathers that had been left on the pier rail. My gran told it to me, and she had it from a woman who sold kites on the cliff road before the sea took the road.

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The daughter was called Moth, because she was small and always at the window. Her mother had a saying scratched on the tower wall from some old tape they'd found: take those broken wings and learn to fly. Her mother also had a rule that nobody flies, because the air above the town was full of wires and hooks. So Moth gathered the fallen feathers one by one and bound them to a frame of bent pipe with pine resin she stole from the boatyard. Forty-one feathers, she counted them. The longest was grey and curved like a question.

On the morning she first went up, a flock came over the bay, a dozen birds lifting off the wave tops like sparks off a bonfire. Her mother shouted from the stairs. Moth didn't hear her. She heard only the wings, and she thought, mine are only broken, not gone, and she jumped.

She did not fly that day. She fell into the shallows with her arms full of splinters and a grey feather stuck to her cheek. But when she lay on the wet sand and looked up, the birds were still climbing, and she laughed until the gulls came down off the wires to see what the noise was about. That is where my gran said the first kite came from.