"subtle desire" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to describe a less-obvious feeling or interest existed, often something that is not openly expressed. For example, "He had a subtle desire for success that drove him to achieve his goals."
We had gone out a number of times together, to fifteen hundred, two thousand metres, without a plan or a destination; I should say, without a conscious destination, but, in essence, impelled by a subtle desire to get ourselves in trouble and then get ourselves out of it.
Subtle desires tend to direct you: Do I really want to climb those crumbly stairs to a likely dead-end?
Despite the extraordinarily detailed intimacy of daily life — the push-and-pull of workplace interactions, sexual distance and difficulty, the subtle fluctuations of desire, jealousy, and sympathy that arise in daily life — the movies is as high-concept as screwball comedies of the classic studio era or its modern-day counterparts.
He's not exactly subtle about his desire to court the gay community.
First, they could offer clear evidence of mechanistic efficacy and could permit the detection of signals that would not be immediately available (e.g. shifting food preference and desire, subtle changes in mood) or be less easily accessible from subjective report (e.g. attention bias to food or altered emotional processing).
At the same time, there are subtle influences of desires on children's ownership judgments, as well as subtle influences of ownership on children's desire judgments.
"Purpose" is not subtle about Bieber's desire for rebirth.
This play between demand and desire is subtle but essential.
The models' poses, though subtle, provoke ideas about desire and the idealized body.
There was even speculation that the situation had been stage-managed by the palace as a very subtle hint about her desire for the union to stay together.
At 80, Mr. Rohmer still seems capable of finding new variations on the themes he has pursued indefatigably over three and a half decades and two dozen films: the shifting dynamics of heterosexual desire, the subtle emotional politics of rivalry and alliance between men and women, and the erotic and intellectual pleasures of talking about it all.
