Black and grey tattoo of a feather on the lower abdomen that breaks apart into flying birds, with a navel piercing visible above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather dissolving into birds on the abdomen

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A feather runs diagonally across the lower abdomen and gradually breaks into small fragments that appear to lift off as birds in flight. The feather is rendered in black and grey with soft shading along its quill and barbs, and the birds are simple dark silhouettes. The skin is shown in close framing against a plain background, with the feather filling the lower half of the frame.

Other Feather Bird Flight Navel piercing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Keep your hands in your lap and let the kettle sulk a while, because you'll want the rest before it boils. Old Mab Tolley kept geese at the edge of Hollin Wood, and the spring her youngest gander went missing she went in after him with a lantern and a heel of bread. She found his trail the way you'd find anything in that wood, by the bits that wouldn't stay put: a single long grey quill lying across the path, then another a stride on, then another.

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The quills got harder to follow. Each one was thinner than the last, and their edges had begun to lift, the barbs fraying into fine dark threads that caught the lantern light. Mab kept walking. By the time the path gave out at a fallen oak she was holding the last feather, and it was no longer whole. It had come apart in her hand, the shaft still sound but the vane broken into a scatter of small black shapes, and as she watched, they lifted off her palm and went up through the branches, wings open, calling to one another like rooks at dusk.

The gander never came home. Mab said she heard him somewhere high above the wood, calling out over the treetops, and that she stood under the oak until the lantern guttered. After that she carried every stray quill she found in her apron pocket, and when she turned them out at night they were always lighter than they had been, as if something had gone on without them.