Black silhouette design of birds flying from a feather beside the script words Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not, on a pale feathered background.

Flying birds, feather and script quote design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a column of solid black silhouette birds rising from a feather drawn on the left, with the phrase Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not in flowing black script beneath them. The feather has fine hatched linework along its vanes, while the birds and lettering are solid black shapes with no shading. It is set on a soft white background with faint feather texture, and the composition is weighted toward the lower left.

Lettering Bird Feather Wing Quote Script Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit in close, the lot of you, the fire's only warm on this side. My grandmother's grandmother kept the lamp on Scarra Head, and this is how she told it, so forgive me any bits I muddle.

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Out past the skerry lived a tern called Oonagh who had never once set foot on the mainland. Every spring she rose off the rocks with the rest of the flock, and every autumn she came home thin and salt-mad. Tam Galbraith, the keeper's boy, used to sit on the wall and count the birds as they went over, and he always lost his count at Oonagh, because she flew faster than the others and never once looked back.

One January the boy went after a dog that had gone over the cliff edge, and the sea took him instead, the way it takes what it fancies. His mother kept the lamp lit for forty nights, climbing the stair with a flask in one hand and his jumper in the other. On the forty-first night a grey feather came down the chimney and lay on the hearth as if someone had posted it.

She carried that feather up to the lantern room and held it against the glass. Out on the black water the terns rose all at once, a long line of them climbing the wind over the head, every wing turned toward the light. Then she turned the lamp down to nothing and went to bed, and for the first time since January the rock was dark, and nobody on it minded.