Black and grey realism tattoo of a feather on the inner forearm, with small birds flying off from its tip.

Feather dissolving into birds on a wrist

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey feather runs diagonally down the inner forearm, with fine barbs and a pale central shaft. From its upper edge, a scattered flock of small solid black birds lifts away towards the wrist. The soft grey gradient fades the feather into the skin, and the plain, light background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Realism Forearm Feather Bird Flock Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rook came in through the broken pane above the sluice room at two in the morning, and by the time Sister Agnes Pike had found a tea towel to catch it, the bird was walking the length of ward seven as though it had been booked a bed. She caught it on the third try. Its feet were cold and it smelled of wet slate.

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Nobody on the night shift could say where it had come from. Mr Lowther in bed four said rooks always knew when a ward was short-staffed, and Agnes said that was nonsense, then spent twenty minutes giving the bird water from a syringe cap. When she carried it out to the back step, it shook itself and a single black feather came loose and drifted onto the lino. She picked it up and pushed it into her cardigan pocket before she thought better of it.

That winter the feather lived in her pocket through every shift. She sat with the dying in the small hours and told them the names of the birds she had seen from the bus. When Mr Lowther's breathing began to slow in February, he asked her to open the window, and she did, and the cold came in with the sound of rooks settling in the chestnut trees across the car park.

At first light the flock lifted all at once, a dark ragged shape that tore itself from the branches and spread over the rooftops in pieces. Agnes stood at the sill with her hand flat on the cold glass. When she reached into her pocket for the feather, it was gone, and she did not look for it again. She went back to her charts and wrote the time down in neat black ink.