Bats flying from a feather

Black and grey · Flash

A shaded feather stands upright in the lower left, with its quill running diagonally up the image. Around twelve solid black bat silhouettes fly up and away from the feather's tip, spread across the upper right of the white background. The feather uses fine grey shading and hatching, while the bats are flat black shapes with no interior detail.

Bat Feather Flight Flock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learned the trade of quill-cutting from Mabel Orr in the paper-lofts of Corvenmoor, where the kingdom kept its debts in ink because ink, the old charter said, could not lie about who owed what. Mabel cut every nib at an angle and never let you touch a goose wing until it had hung a month in the drying shed. "A feather remembers the bird," she told you, "so mind what you write with it."

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The winter the Chamberlain came asking for the Tallow Roll, you held the only key to the eastern loft. He wanted one name struck from the register of the poor, a widow's son, and a tally of coin written in its place. You sat through the night with a grey pinion across your knees, its shaft still soft, and wrote the sentence he dictated. Your hand would not stop shaking until the lamp guttered and the nib split.

At dawn the ink was dry, but the page was empty. Where the names had been there was only a flicker, then a rush of small leathery wings through the rafters, twelve, then twenty, pouring out through the broken shutter and up into the grey sky above the castle. The Chamberlain shouted for the guards. You walked past them all, down the stairs and out to the widow's door, with the spent feather tucked behind your ear.

She read the blank page you laid on her table and said nothing for a long time. That evening the bats came home to her eaves and hung there in a row, black as closed ledgers, waiting for someone to ask them what they owed.