Fine line black script reading Take these broken wings and learn to fly, curving down the ribs beside a small bird silhouette.

Script quote and bird on ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a curved line of handwritten script reading "Take these broken wings and learn to fly", with a small bird silhouette above the end of the text. A smaller outline mark sits near the collarbone at the top of the frame. Thin black linework sits on pale skin, with a hand resting at the left edge of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Quote Bird Wing Text Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ashdown had left the bird on the bench with its wings wrapped in a paper bag, and Tobias had spent three evenings trying to fit them back. The automaton was a finch no longer than a thumb, brass and enamel, built for a shop window in Whitby before the war. Its wings had snapped at the joints, and the hinges were so fine that he had to pull the lamp down to his eyebrows and clamp a magnifier above the bench.

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On the fourth night he found the note. It was rolled tight inside the hollow of the body, a strip of onion-skin paper no wider than a bookmark, written in faded blue ink with a looping hand that leaned hard to the right. Take these broken wings and learn to fly. Below it, smaller, someone had pressed so hard that the nib had torn the paper: Not yet, Walter. Not yet.

Tobias knew Walter Ashdown only as the man who paid in exact change and always asked after the weather. He had never thought of him as someone who had wanted to leave anything behind. He sat with the note under the lamp for a long time, listening to the shop clock tick through the wall, and wondered who had been meant to fly and who had been told to wait.

He set the wings with a pair of tweezers, one hinge at a time, and slid the paper back into the body where it had been. When the finch lifted its brass head and opened its wings in the lamplight, the note stayed folded small against its chest, where nobody would think to look.