Black and grey realism feather tattoo with fading splatter dots and script lettering reading There, but for the grace of God, go I, on the side of a torso.

Feather and script quote on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey feather rises diagonally up the left side of the frame, with shaded barbs and fine splatter dots drifting off its upper edge. Beside it, flowing cursive script in dark ink spells out the phrase There, but for the grace of God, go I across several lines. The shading is soft and smooth with strong contrast between the dark feather and the lighter skin, and the composition follows the curve of the side of the body.

Realism Lettering Ribs Feather Script Quote Splatter Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lost property cupboard at Calder Bridge had not been properly sorted since Easter, so when I opened it on Tuesday the smell of wet wool came up first, then a faded timetable, two umbrellas and a feather as long as my forearm, caught in the lining of a child's satchel. Nobody had claimed it. Nobody ever claims the odd things, only the umbrellas.

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I had worked the ticket barrier for twenty-two years and believed I could read a traveller from the gate. Men who smelt of lager and wanted a fare they could not pay got a lecture from me, and I was proud of those lectures. Then one Thursday in February a lad in a borrowed coat came through with a split lip and a ticket to Carlisle he could not afford. I was about to send him back out into the sleet when my mother's voice came out of my own mouth: there, but for the grace of God, go I. She used to say it at the bus stop, watching people shout at drivers. I had never understood it until I heard it in my own throat.

I paid the difference from the petty cash tin and wrote it in the book as a lost penny, which is what the company calls a kindness it cannot account for. The lad never looked back at the barrier. Two weeks later a postcard arrived with no name on it, only a feather drawn in biro, its barbs flecked with dots like rain on a window, and beneath it a line of joined-up writing saying he was in Carlisle and had found work at a bakery.

I pinned the postcard above the till where the timetables go. Mr Pell asks me every morning why a grown man keeps a bird's feather on his wall. I tell him it was left in lost property, which is true, and that I have never claimed it either.