Black and grey flash design of a shaded feather with the script words One day I'll fly away running diagonally across it.

Feather with One day I'll fly away script

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil-style drawing of a feather angled from the lower left to the upper right, with soft feathered shading along its barbs and a fine central quill. The words One day I'll fly away are written in flowing black script across the feather. The design is shown in black and grey on a plain white background, with no skin or body part visible.

Lettering Feather Script Lettering Quote

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

You find the feather caught in the brass rail of the lantern room on the morning the wind backs round to the north-east, grey and fine as pencil shading, its quill bent where a gull has struck the glass. Your father is already down the spiral stair with the paraffin can, calling that the lamp will not light itself, and you stand with the feather between finger and thumb while the sea below throws itself at the rocks like something trying to get in.

Keep reading

Keep it, he says later, when you bring it to the kitchen table. Gulls moult like everything else. But you have been copying words from the back of the logbook since the summer, the ones your mother scratched onto the inside of the pantry door before she took the mainland ferry and never came back on it: One day I'll fly away. You have never been sure whether she meant the ferry or the sky.

That night you climb to the gallery with a pencil and the feather and try to draw it the way the gulls look when they hang over the bay, every barb separate, the shading soft where the vane meets the quill. Your hand is clumsy. The letters go across it crooked, and the beam swings out over the water every twenty seconds, white and then dark, so the page keeps changing under your pencil.

In the morning the feather is gone from the table. Your father has pinned it to the lamp room wall beside the tide tables, and beneath it, in his square hand, he has written nothing at all. You study the drawing in the grey light and understand he has left the rest for you to finish. You pick up the pencil and begin.