Black feather tattoo on the upper back that breaks apart into a flock of flying bird silhouettes towards the shoulder.

Feather dissolving into birds on the back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black feather runs diagonally down the upper back, with a thin pale line left through its central shaft to show the quill. Its right-hand edge breaks up into small black bird silhouettes that drift up and out towards the shoulder. The image is in black ink and grey skin tones, with a plain, close crop focused on the tattoo.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The gulls have gone quiet since the wind turned, so I can hear the lamp ticking as it warms, which is a thing I never noticed in thirty years until you left and there was nobody to tell me to hush. Yesterday I found a feather wedged under the rail of the gallery, long and black as a coal scuttle, its quill still bent the way a wing bends when it has been folded too hard. I put it in the tin with the logbooks. Then this morning the swifts came off the cliff in a rope of birds, a hundred at least, and I stood there with my tea going cold and watched them break apart over the bay like someone had shaken out a sheet.

Mr Dunn from the mainland boat says you have a flat in Leith now and a job at the fish market counting crates. I did not believe him until he showed me the postcard. Your handwriting is still all loops, the way it was when you were nine and wrote me notes about the seals. Do not apologise for leaving. Your mother would have said the same, and she never liked the sea either.

I climbed up at dusk and tried to make the feather whole again in my head, the way the vane holds together, each barb hooked to the next. It cannot be done. Every time I look at it the birds have already started to lift off the edge and go. I think that is the thing I wanted to tell you. Not that I miss you, though I do, but that a thing can come apart and still be going somewhere.

The lamp is lit. I have left the door on the latch.

Dad

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