Black and grey realism drawing of two crossed feathers on a white background, a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed feathers in black and grey

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two large feathers crossed in an X shape against a plain white background. The quills are drawn with fine, directional strokes and the barbs are shaded in soft greys and deep blacks to create volume. The composition is centred and isolated, with no skin or body part visible.

Realism Feather Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The second pair of feathers came up the lane in a post bag from a man who never gave his name, tied with grey thread and carrying no stamp. Mrs Ada Pell turned them over on the sorting table at Hollin Cross, the way she turned over anything that had no business being there, and found a slip of paper beneath them that said only: keep them crossed until I come back.

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She knew the first pair. Her brother Walter had brought two grey goose quills home from the autumn fair the year he went to sea, and they had lain crossed on the mantelpiece until the damp got into the barbs and they curled like old hair. He wrote to her every month from Valparaiso in a hand so small she needed the lamp to read it, and each letter came with a feather tucked in the fold, black at the tip, as if he were posting her pieces of the weather.

The new pair were darker, nearly soot, and the shafts were cut at a slant she recognised as a sailor's knife. She did not open the bag until the van had gone and the lane had gone quiet, and then she sat with the feathers across her knees while the light slid long over the sorting shelves. Beyond the orchard wall the wind was lifting the late windfalls and rolling them into the ditch.

She laid them crossed on the table, one over the other, the way he always had, and wrote on a blank card that the box would stay open till Michaelmas. Then she filled the kettle and, for the first time in eleven years, left the back door unbolted.