Close-up of a realistic, shaded blue and lilac feather tattoo on a person's lower abdomen, above black lace underwear.

Blue feather tattoo on the lower abdomen

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A single feather is shown at an angle, with its quill running diagonally and its barbs softly separated. The feather uses fine, soft shading and highlights to suggest depth, with blue, teal and lilac tones. The composition is a close crop of the midriff, with a navel piercing and black lace underwear visible.

Realism Other Feather Navel piercing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the week before the winter fast, Brother Oswin ran out of quills. The geese at the monastery of St Brannoc had been eaten at Martinmas, and the abbot said there would be no more until the spring flocks came over the moor. Oswin sat at his desk with an empty pot of ink and a psalter half copied, and he did not complain, which the brothers found harder to bear than complaint.

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Tam, the gatekeeper's boy, climbed the scree below the chapel to the ledge where the jays nested. He came down with a single feather no longer than his hand. It was blue at the tip and lilac where the light caught it, with a teal sheen along the spine, and its barbs had loosened from one another like wet hair. He put it on Oswin's desk and went back to his gate without being asked.

Oswin said it was too soft to cut. He tried anyway, because there was nothing else, and the nib slid through the barbs as a hand slides through a stream. The psalms came out thin and grey-blue, the letters wavering as if written on a windy day. The abbot looked at the page for a long time and then said it would do, though he would not say why.

A pilgrim found the book fifty years later and turned to the last leaf, where a feather had been drawn in the margin, shaded in three colours that had not faded. Nobody at the house could say who had painted it. Tam, very old by then, said only that the jays had come back to that ledge every spring, and that he had never once gone up for another.