Colour tattoo of a yellow awareness ribbon wrapped around a shaded grey feather, with small birds flying off it, on the side of a person's ribs.

Feather and yellow ribbon with birds on ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a shaded grey and black feather looped through a yellow awareness ribbon, with a scatter of small black birds lifting away from the feather tip towards the right. The feather uses fine black linework and soft grey shading, while the ribbon is filled with yellow and darker grey shadowing to give it dimension. It sits on the side of the torso against a plain, lightly lit background.

Ribs Feather Ribbon Awareness ribbon Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The starlings had to be counted before they could leave, and Ines was never any good at counting birds. Eleven in the cage on Tuesday, nine by Thursday, and the feather she had picked off the loft floor lay on the bench with its yellow ribbon still knotted at the quill.

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Station rules said a bird could be released only when the day's ledger was signed. Ines signed it at the hatch with frost still on the glass, the way her mother had, and the warden, a broad man named Oskar Lund who never smiled before breakfast, watched her fingers shake and said nothing about it.

She carried the cage up to the outer airlock. Beyond the glass the grey bulk of the ring turned slowly against nothing. She opened the door and the birds went out in a loose ribbon of their own, lifting, splitting, scattering across the black like pepper shaken from a hand. One came back. It landed on the feather's tip, hooked its claws into the vane, and sat there looking at her with the patience of something that had never been asked to explain itself.

Oskar came up behind her and tied a second yellow ribbon to the cage door, the way the old wardens did for every crew member who went home. "Nine out, one stays," he said. Ines pressed the feather to her palm. It weighed less than the ledger, less than anything else on the station, and she decided that would be enough to carry back down the spoke.