Colourful watercolour feather tattoo in blue, orange and red with the script words Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not, on a person's upper back.

Watercolour feather with quote on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A watercolour-style feather in blue, orange, red and purple sweeps diagonally across the upper back, with loose splashes of colour around its tip. Black cursive script to the right reads Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not in four lines. The photograph is taken from behind, showing only the back of the head and shoulder, with soft natural lighting.

Back Feather Watercolour Splashes Quote Script Wing Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The young kestrel has been pacing your glove since the wall of Hallam Keep came into view, its talons opening and closing on the leather as though it can already smell the open moor. You tell yourself it is only the wind. Your father waits below in the nettles with his cap in his hands, the way he stood at the chapel gate the morning your brother left for the mills in Leeds, and he does not look up.

Keep reading

The keep has no roof now, only a stone stair climbing to nothing and window arches full of sky. Rooks have claimed the highest ledge, and their clatter follows you up the last turn. At the top you untie the jess and feel the weight lift off your wrist, the small hooked head turning once to take in the valley, the river, the grey smudge of the far fells. It does not look back at you. You had hoped it would, and you are ashamed of hoping.

His voice drifts up through the broken arch, rough with the cold. He says the bird will be back by dusk if it has any sense, the way they always are, and you understand he is not only talking about the bird. You keep your arm raised long after the kestrel has shrunk to a speck above the ash trees, its feathers catching the light as it turns, rust and blue and a flare of orange at the wing.

When you climb down, the nettles are trampled flat where he stood. A single feather has snagged in the seam of the glove. You work it free and hold it up against the sun, and the light goes through it in a thin bright blade, colour bleeding from the root to the tip the way a thing does once it has been let go properly.