Side view of a torso in a bikini on a beach, showing a black and grey shaded feather on the hip, a column of small birds up the ribs and fine script with stars above.

Feather, birds and script on a side torso

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a person's side and hip on a beach, with a bikini top and bottom in blue, teal and white. A large shaded feather in black and grey sits over the hip, with light and dark tones giving it volume, and a line of small flying birds rises from it up the side of the ribs. Fine script reading "Lucky times never stop", framed by two small stars, sits higher on the side of the torso against a muted, overcast background.

Realism Lettering Ribs Feather Bird Script Star Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Take your boots off the wall, Tam, and listen, because the keep at Harrowgate fell in the wet year and the sea has been eating it ever since. The top window still stands. Jackdaws roost in it, and at dusk they lift off the broken battlements in one long black ribbon, splitting into small flocks that scatter over the headland like ash off a fire.

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Osric, the last steward's boy, used to climb the stair every evening to count them. He never got past forty. His mother sold eggs on the harbour and said counting was a fool's way of spending daylight. One grey morning he found a long feather caught in the ivy below the window, a gull's by the look of it, dark at the spine and pale at the tip. He carried it down to the harbour and sold it to a sailmaker for three pennies, bought a heel of bread with one, and the sailmaker's wife gave him a red ribbon for nothing because she liked the look of his face.

The sea took the stair that winter, and Osric never went back up. But the birds kept coming to the headland, and the boy grew into a man who kept the lamp at the new light and never once counted anything. Each dusk he stood at the rail and watched the flocks peel off the old walls, the way a feather comes apart when the wind gets under it.

His sons asked him why he never climbed up after them. He tied the red ribbon to the lamp-house gate, now faded to pink, and said the birds had only gone on ahead to find the next bit of luck, and that they were welcome to it.