Colour tattoo of a purple and grey feather with a tattooed cord anklet of turquoise and orange beads on a woman's ankle.

Feather and beaded anklet tattoo on an ankle

Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A feather runs down the outside of the ankle and foot, with a tattooed cord anklet and small turquoise and orange beads wrapped around the leg above it. The feather has dark black outlines and fine barbs, with grey shading near the quill and purple and lilac fill towards the tip. The background is a dark blue leather surface, and the image is a close, well-lit photo of the foot and ankle.

Ankle Feather Anklet Bead Cord Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth found the feather at ten past three, lying across the open drawer of clean cannulas as if something had flown in through the ventilation grille and thought better of it. Grey at the root, with black-edged barbs, and then near the tip the colour turned violet, then lilac, as though someone had dipped it in the dusk over the car park. She held it up to the strip light and felt faintly foolish, a grown woman in a paper hat examining a bird's leftovers.

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Ward 7 at night kept its own rules. Bed four wanted the window open, bed nine wanted it shut, and the lift to radiology sighed every time it passed the second floor. Near the family room door she found a length of waxed cord with a few beads still threaded on it, turquoise and one orange bead, knotted into a loop small enough to fit a child's wrist. Somebody's keepsake, dropped in the rush. She logged it in the lost property bag with a biro cross and put the bag in the cupboard under the desk.

At half five Mr Dunmore, awake and cross about his breakfast, asked what she had in her pocket that rustled. She showed him the feather. He went quiet, then said his daughter had picked one up from a jay on the moors above Hebden Bridge when she was nine, and had tied it to the cord she wore everywhere. He had been the one to unpick it from her hair the week before she died. Ruth did not know what to say, so she did what her mother had always done: she wound the feather once around the cord from the bag, and left it on his locker where he could see it.