Solid black feather tattoo on a person's upper back with a flock of birds flying off from its tip towards the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather and birds on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A bare upper back and shoulder shows a large solid black feather with fine pale lines suggesting the quill and barbs. A cluster of small black bird silhouettes rises from the feather and drifts up towards the shoulder blade. The ink is pure black on warm brown skin, and the feather runs diagonally down the back with the birds scattered to the left.

Shoulder Back Feather Bird Flying bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abigail Tully had been ladling broth for eleven weeks when the first gull came down onto the galley hatch and would not leave. She shooed it with a wooden spoon. It sat there watching the pot. The next morning there was a feather on the boards beside the stove, long and black as wet slate. She picked it up and tucked it in her apron, because it seemed a waste to throw it over the side.

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That night the cabin boy, Pim, swore the stove was talking. Abigail said stoves do not talk, and went to look. The feather lay on the table where she had left it, and the lamp threw its shadow across the planks. The shadow had grown wings. She laughed at that, and then she stopped laughing, because the shadow lifted off the wood and broke into a dozen small birds that flew out through the porthole into the dark.

The captain did not believe her, but he could not explain the rigging of the Marigold, which was found in the morning strung with gulls from bow to stern, every one of them sitting still and quiet as church. Abigail gave them crumbs and told them to mind their manners. They did not eat from the pot.

When the Marigold came in to Hull with her hold full of cod, the birds rose all together and went over the harbour wall, black against the grey. Pim said he saw the feather fly up last, turning slowly in the wind, and then it was gone. Abigail went back to her broth and never once looked for it.