Black and grey feather tattoo with a dotted ornamental anklet design, shown on a bare ankle and foot against a white background.

Feather and dotted anklet tattoo

Dotwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey feather sits on the top of the foot and runs down towards the ankle, with fine gradients along its barbs. Above it, a fine-line ornamental anklet design with dotted chains and teardrop drops wraps around the ankle. The photograph is a close, well-lit view of the foot on a plain white surface, with painted pale pink toenails.

Dotwork Realism Ankle Feather Anklet Chain Dotted line Teardrop Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the ninth week out of Falmouth the bread had gone hard and the water tasted of the cask, and Tomas Reeve began to suspect the ship was carrying something it had not been given. The cook found the feather first, grey and long, lying across the flour sacks as though someone had set it down to keep the place. Nobody aboard the Wren's Pride would own to it.

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The old carpenter said it was a gull's, and that gulls followed a ship that was owed a debt. The boy who swept the galley said it was a heron's, and that herons stood in the shallows waiting for a thing to come to them. They argued until the watch changed. Tomas kept quiet and turned the feather over, and along its spine he found a line of small dark beads pressed into the quill, each one hung with a tiny drop like rain about to fall.

That night the wind died and the sea went flat as slate. Tomas took the feather to the rail and asked the water what it wanted. A ring of dark dots rose up on the surface, one after another, like a chain being paid out from below, and each drop caught the lantern light. He understood then that the chain had been made for a woman who had walked off the quay at Falmouth years before, and that the feather was the fee she had paid to be let go. He dropped it in. The wind came back before the bell struck four, and the Wren's Pride made Cork by the Thursday with her sails full and her bread fresh.