Black and grey shaded feather tattoo with a yellow-tinged quill nib on the shoulder of a person against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather and quill tattoo on the shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A shaded feather with defined barbs runs diagonally across the shoulder, with its quill tip ending in a yellow-gold nib. The feather uses black and grey tones with soft gradations, and the gold colour appears only on the nib. The photograph is framed close on the shoulder and neck against a plain black background.

Realism Shoulder Feather Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Ransome had been on her knees in the sweet peas for an hour when she noticed the crow. It sat on the rain butt with one wing held a little away from its body, the way a man holds his hat when he means to speak, and it had sat there every morning since the frost went out of the ground.

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On the third morning she found the feather. It lay in the soil between two canes, as long as her forearm, black at the edges and silver where the light got into it. At its tip someone had fixed a nib of old gold, worn soft as a thumbnail. She picked it up, and the crow dropped from the butt and walked the length of the path toward her, not hurrying, stopping only to tilt its head at the feather in her hand.

'It's yours,' she said. 'I expect you want it back.' The crow made a sound like a gate on a bad hinge. So she sat on the upturned bucket, dipped the nib in the ink she kept for the seed labels, and wrote to her brother Tom, who had gone for a soldier and not written since Michaelmas. She wrote which beans had failed and which had not, and that the crow had waited by the back door through three weeks of rain for something it could not name. Every word came out plain, and she found she could not make the nib write anything false, though she tried once, to see.

When the letter was sealed she held the feather out. The crow took it in its beak, carried it to the rain butt, and laid it on the rim as neatly as a clerk putting away his pen. Tom's answer came in August. It was two lines in his cramped hand, and at the foot of the page, in a smudge of black, was the print of a small bird's foot.