Black fine line script tattoo reading "Take these broken wings and learn to fly" with a small bird silhouette on the forearm.

Quote and bird on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a two-line handwritten script quote, "Take these broken wings and learn to fly", with a small solid black bird silhouette to the right of the second line. The lettering uses thin, even linework in black ink with no shading, and the bird is filled solid. The photo is taken close up across the forearm against a dark wooden background, with the text running diagonally across the skin.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Quote Script Bird Wing Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swift came down the flue on Tuesday, which Dad said was the sort of thing swifts did when they had given up on being sensible. I found it in the potting shed under the upturned trug, one wing folded the wrong way, its beak open at me as if I owed it money. Dad wanted to put it in a box and wait for the vet, but the vet in Aldbury only does cats and the odd tortoise, so I did what Nan would have done and rang the bird rescue on the number she kept taped inside the fuse cupboard.

Keep reading

The woman on the phone was called Pru, and she spoke as though she had rescued a thousand of them, which she probably had. Keep it dark, she said. Keep it still. Don't give it bread. So I sat with the shed door shut and a cardboard box punched with air holes, and I read the bird the crossword clues out loud, because you should always talk to a frightened thing in a normal voice. Nan's rose was climbing the outside wall, and the afternoon light came through the gaps in the boards in long stripes.

It lived four days. On the fifth morning Pru collected it and said the wing would never take the weight of a proper flight, but a swift that cannot fly is still a swift, and she had seen them glide the length of a lawn on less. I did not believe her. On the sixth morning I opened the back door and found a single feather on the step, black as a stroke of ink, and somewhere above the roofs a dozen small birds were screaming at the sky.

I copied the words onto the back of one of Nan's seed packets in my neatest hand and pinned it above the shed bench, where the light still comes in through the boards in stripes.