Black and grey realism tattoo of a feather hanging from a beaded cord around the ankle, with a flock of small birds flying across the top of the foot.

Black feather on a cord anklet with birds

Realism · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A feather hangs from a beaded cord wrapped around the ankle, with its quill and barbs shaded in soft greys and deep blacks to suggest texture and depth. A flock of small black bird silhouettes trails from the ankle across the top of the foot toward the toes. The tattoo is entirely black and grey against pale skin, photographed from the side on a dark and light background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm, you will think me vain for writing twice in a week, but the scriptorium has been full of starlings since Michaelmas and I cannot keep my mind on the psalter for watching them. They come down over the orchard wall at dusk, a thousand small dark commas that bend and fold and then, all at once, lift away toward the marsh as though someone had called them by name.

Keep reading

Sister Hild, who keeps the almonry, says they are the souls of the drowned fishermen from Saltney, and you know how she is. I told her they were only birds, and she gave me the look she keeps for novices who forget the hours. Still, I have been sorting quills for the new gospel book, and I found the one you left me in the spring, the long grey primary of a heron, bound at its root with waxed thread and three little bone beads. I had forgotten you tied it so. It hung on the peg by my window all summer, and every time the door opened it turned like a weathervane.

I took it down this morning and cut a fresh nib, and when I dipped it the ink ran black down the vane in a line as fine as a hair, and I thought of the birds. Perhaps that is all the drowned are, a stroke of dark that lifts off the page when nobody is reading. I have begun the illumination for the feast of Saint Brendan with a flock of wrens across the margin, every one of them a little wrong, and I think I will leave them that way.

Come before the frost if you can. Bring the heron quill's sister if you have one.

Your brother in ink, Edwin

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