Digital drawing of a black feather with ragged plumes and cyan smoke curling from its tips, shown as a tattoo design on a pale grey background.

Black feather with cyan smoke

Mixed · Flash

A single feather, drawn in heavy black with feathered, spiky barbs, rises up the frame and tapers to a pale quill at the base. Cyan smoke or flame wisps trail from the upper tips and the left side, adding a bright accent to the dark shapes. The design is centred on a plain light grey backdrop with soft, mottled texture.

Feather Smoke Flame Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming down on Kettle Lane since four, and Nell Ashdown had given up on the awning, letting it sag and drip onto her trestle of brass keys and cracked teacups. The man who stopped at her table turned over a pewter button, then a glass eye, then asked, without looking up, whether she had anything that remembered weather.

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She had a drawer of things she could not sell. She opened it and took out a long black feather, its barbs ragged as a thornbush, the quill gone pale and sharp as a bone needle. "Rook," she said. "Came in with a box of lace from a house on Wren Street. It won't stay dry." He paid in coins still warm from his pocket, laid the feather flat on the wet wood and struck a match. The flame that took was cyan, not yellow, and it climbed the spines without scorching the price tag.

Rain hissed on the tarpaulins. Down the row a fishmonger shouted about cod, a child laughed, and the blue smoke rose straight up, thin as cotton thread, past the chimneys and out where the rooftops gave way to cloud. Nell watched it drift east over the railway and the dark mills, a line drawn across the sky that somebody, somewhere, was bound to see.

When she looked down, the man had gone and the feather had gone with him, and the wood under her hands was dry. Only the brass keys were still wet. She picked one up and found it warm, as if something had been signed for.