Colour tattoo of a feather hanging from a chain on the inner ankle and top of the foot, shaded in orange, pink, yellow and blue.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful feather with chain on an ankle

Realism · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A feather hangs from a short chain drawn across the ankle and down onto the top of the foot. The feather has soft shading and fine barbs, and its quill is outlined in dark ink. The bright orange, pink, yellow and blue tones sit against bare skin, with purple painted toenails and pink flowers blurred in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put the kettle on again, Ruth, and sit where I can see your face, because this is the sort of story that goes wrong if you keep looking at the clock. Night porters have passed it down from the old ones, and the old ones had it from a woman called Aggie Lowther, who shod horses above a wool mill in Hebden Bridge.

Keep reading

One February a kestrel moulted over her yard and a single feather came down, rust and gold at the root and a blue no bird in England carried. It landed on the cobbles by her forge, and the wind wanted it back. Aggie had no use for it, but she had a length of fine chain left over from a clock mechanism, and she hung the feather from one link so it could not be carried off to the tops.

Every morning for a year she walked past it with her bread and her boots. The feather lifted in the draught, dropped, lifted again, and she swore it was learning the shape of the yard. A carter asked her why she kept a thing that wanted to leave. She said the chain was not there to stop it leaving, only to remind it where the warm was.

The winter she died, the chain was still hanging from the cold nail by her door, and nobody cut the feather loose. When the spring gales came the chain swung out over the step, and the feather flew the length of it and no further. The men who found it said it looked less like a prisoner than a bird that had finally decided where home was. Right, Ruth, that's your round. Go on, the trolley's waiting.

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