Black tattoo on a side ribs placement of a shaded feather whose tip breaks up into a flock of flying birds.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birds rising from a feather on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A flock of small black bird silhouettes rises in a diagonal line from the shaded quill of a feather, which fades into the birds at its upper edge. The feather is rendered with fine, dense hatching and soft grey shading, while the birds are solid silhouettes. The tattoo is shown in black ink on warm, slightly blurred skin, with the subject's upper arm and side visible at the edge of the frame.

Ribs Bird Feather Flock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Aunt Hesper,

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The clerk at the Vell gate weighed my letter twice this morning, as if the ink might have grown heavier on the road. I told him it was only news of the moult. Every autumn the royal aviary of Ossery sheds its grey starlings, and every autumn the palace keeps one long primary feather from each bird, tied into a ledger beside the bird's name. This year the ledger is mine to keep, because Master Quennel's hands have gone to shaking and he can no longer hold a pen steady enough for a fair hand.

Yesterday I found the feather that belonged to Sorrel, the bird who sat on the sill of the east tower and sang the wrong tune on purpose. It was black at the tip and grey at the root, and when I held it to the window the light passed straight through the barbs. I thought of the flock that rose each dusk from the reed beds below the citadel, how they bent into a line over the river and then broke apart, scattering like a handful of ash thrown up into the cold.

I have decided to keep the feather rather than file it. Tonight I will climb the tower and let it go over the wall, because the old custom says a feather must be released so the bird can find its way home. I expect the wind will take it south, toward you.

Yours in the grey and the damp, Tamsin Vey, under-scrivener