Colour tattoo of a feather breaking into small flying birds with the script Love Dad beneath it, on the calf.

Feather dissolving into birds on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A large feather runs diagonally down the leg, with its quill and vanes shaded in blue, green, teal and pink. Small birds in matching colours scatter from its upper edge, and the script Love Dad sits near the base of the feather. The shading is soft and detailed, and the colours are set against plain pale skin on a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Isla, the swallows came back to the Salt Gate on Tuesday, a full week before the tide-bells said they would. I stood on the harbour wall with my tea going cold and counted them as they came in low over the reed-boats, nineteen of them, and I thought of you trying to count the carriages on the Queen's Road that first morning.

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I am sending the long grey primary I kept from the heron that drowned in the eel-weir. Keep it out of the damp. Your mother used to say a feather will shed the weather if you let it. I have cut quills from it for every scribe in Oldmere for thirty years, but this one I will not sell. Hold it up to the window and you will find the blue in it, the green under the vane, and the pink where the light catches the spine, the same pink as her ribbon.

The birds go south when the reeds turn, and nobody in this town thinks it strange that something so light can cross the whole sea. I used to think it a sad trick of the season. Now I think it is closer to a promise: whatever leaves the wall finds its way back to it, one bird at a time, scattering from the same quill.

Come home when the frost takes the weir, and mind the front door, which still sticks. If you no longer need the feather, send it back and I will cut it again for the next child who asks. Love, Dad

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