Realistic brown feather with teal wisps and orange-brown birds rising from it, tattooed on a person's ankle and lower leg.

Feather dissolving into birds on an ankle

Realism · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A brown feather shaded to look three-dimensional rises up the leg, with its upper tip breaking into a flock of orange-brown birds in flight. Soft teal wisps curl behind the feather, and a small dark bird sits near its base. The image shows the ankle and lower leg against a wooden floor, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry to Carrick Quay had been cancelled for the third day running, so Nell Harrow spent the wet afternoon in her uncle's net loft, sorting a box of his old letters by weight of the envelope. Most were bills. One was written on the back of a chart of the Solway, in pencil so faded she had to tilt it toward the window. It described a grey heron that had landed on the wrong side of the harbour wall and refused to leave, and how the gulls had mobbed it until it lifted, all at once, into a sky full of wingbeats that looked, he wrote, like a quill giving up its last ink.

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She went down to the slip at dusk with the chart folded in her coat. The tide was out and the shingle smelled of tar and kelp. Old Mr Penhale was there, as he always was, mending a lobster pot with twine the colour of tea. She asked him whether he remembered her uncle's heron. He laughed so hard he had to sit on an upturned crate, then told her the bird had been a tern, and that the whole harbour had argued about it for a week.

When she walked home the wind had got into the gulls' feathers on the wall and was lifting them off one at a time, brown and white, and carrying them over the water toward the lighthouse. She stood until the last one was gone. Then she took the chart out, found the place where her uncle had marked the heron's landing, and wrote beneath it, in her own hand, that the tern had been right all along.

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