Black fine line tattoo of a feather outline above the script "In the end, we'll all become stories" on a forearm.

Feather and quote on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather outline is drawn in thin black linework, with its quill trailing diagonally to the left. Below it, the words "In the end, we'll all become stories." are set in a neat, hand-lettered black script across two lines. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour, and the photo is taken straight on against a dark background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Feather Quote Script Text

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the feather on the walkway outside flat 41, snagged against the railing, grey and barred, its quill bent like a hook. Mrs Okonedo from 38 leans out of her doorway and says it belongs to a gull, though gulls don't come this high, and you say it's a pigeon's, though you couldn't say why it matters. You take it up in the lift anyway, which smells of bleach and somebody's vinegar chips, and you run your thumb over the scratched names on the wall, dates going back to a decade nobody here remembers.

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Dev from the fourth floor is in the lift with his recycling bags. He reads the feather's quill as if it were a sentence and says every building needs a record of who lived in it. You tell him nobody reads the newsletter he prints on the community centre's machine. He says that isn't the point, and you don't ask what the point is, because you already suspect he has been writing the block's history on the back of council letters for years.

You pin the feather to the noticeboard by the bins with a drawing pin and a strip of card. Underneath, in biro, you write the line you half remember from a film you watched alone: in the end, we'll all become stories. By June the card is covered. Someone adds a recipe for rice pudding, someone else a lost tabby called Biscuit, a birth announced in purple felt tip, a complaint about the lift in capitals.

In March the council sends men with rollers and the board is stripped to bare cork. You go out to see the damage and find the feather wedged behind the bin, its card gone soft with rain. The biro has run, but the words are still there, and so is the feather, which was never the story at all, only the thing that held everyone's pages in place long enough to be read.