Black and grey photograph of two forearms with tattoos of birds flying up towards the wrists, where they become shaded feathers, on a person wearing a black top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird flock and feather tattoos on both forearms

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown, each with a flock of bird silhouettes rising from the elbow area towards the wrist. Near the wrist, the birds blend into a large shaded feather that runs down the forearm. The image is black and white, with the solid bird shapes contrasting against the soft grey tones of the feather and skin.

Forearm Bird Feather Flock Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Ashgrove road had been empty for forty miles when the Corolla coughed its last and rolled onto the gravel shoulder, and my brother Dev swore at it the way he swore at everything he loved. We walked. The sun sat on the ridge like a coin somebody had dropped and didn't bother to pick up.

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Halfway to the windmill, a flock lifted off the fence wire all at once, a hundred or more, black against a sky gone white with heat. They rose in a long ragged tail that bent, straightened, bent again, until it looked like a hand waving goodbye to nobody in particular. Dev stopped walking. I stopped too, because you do, out there, when something decides to move.

When the last of them had gone over the mesas, a single grey feather was still caught on a barb, long as my forearm and darker at the root, like smoke that had thought better of rising. Dev pulled it free and held it up to the light. 'Gran used to say a feather that lands in your path is a message you're late reading,' he said. I told him Gran also said the moon was a shop door left open. He laughed, then went quiet, and handed the feather over without another word.

We never did get a lift that afternoon. A lorry driver with a radio full of cricket scores finally took us as far as the coast, and the feather rode the whole way in my jacket pocket. Somewhere past the salt flats I reached for my keys and found it first, a little stiff at the tip, pointing back the way we'd come.