Black ink tattoo on a thigh with script lettering reading Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not, a flock of birds and a feather.

Quote, birds and feather on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a thigh with a tattoo of a flock of birds rising from a feather on the left. The phrase Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not is written in flowing black script across the centre of the design. The ink is solid black with clean, even linework, and the composition is framed close to the leg.

Lettering Thigh Bird Feather Quote Script Flock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the wasps on that windfall. Late August, and the Coxes are dropping off the branches faster than Mabel can gather them. You want the story of the Hollis boy? Right. He was eleven the summer the swallows came down on the orchard wall like a dropped shawl, and his mother had told him they were only passing through.

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Every evening that August he climbed the ladder to the top of the perry pear and watched them gather on the wire by the lane. Hundreds of them, shuffling and chattering, turning all at once the way starlings do, as if one mind had remembered something. He kept a grey feather tucked in his cap, a flight feather from a bird that had struck the cider house glass in spring and never got up. He'd carried it all summer like a ticket.

On the last evening the wire was nearly bare by the time he reached the top rung. Only one bird was left, low on the hedge, flapping one wing and then the other, trying the air. His father came out with the lantern and said, 'She's ready, lad, look at her go.' The boy said nothing. He had decided, the way children decide things, that a bird which stays behind has given up on the journey, and he could not bear to see it give up alone.

So he stood on that ladder until the lantern went out. When he came down the feather was gone from his cap. Next morning there was one swallow fewer on the wire and one feather more in the grass under the pear, and nobody in the Hollis house ever said which was which.