Black tattoo of a large feather on the side of a ribcage, its lower edge breaking up into a flock of small birds flying across the skin.

Feather dissolving into birds on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large black feather runs down the side of the ribcage, with its quill near the top and its soft barbs fanning out at the bottom. Towards the left, the feather's edge dissolves into a scatter of small bird silhouettes that thin out as they drift across the skin. The image is in solid black ink with no colour, shown in a close side view with a black top at the upper edge and a light grey garment at the bottom.

Blackwork Ribs Feather Bird Flock Silhouette

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit where the lamp can't blind you, and mind the step, because the third one from the bottom has been loose since your grandfather's day. Now, the feather. Every autumn a single black quill came down the stairwell of the Skerrow light, carried on the draught from the glass, and every autumn Mab Tulloch swept it into the tin with the others and said nothing.

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The birds came in October, when the fulmars and the starlings were crossing over from the north in their thousands. They struck the lantern on foggy nights and fell like sleet onto the gallery rail. My father counted them every morning for thirty years and wrote the numbers in the log in pencil. He never once wrote down the feather.

Then came the winter the relief boat didn't come, and Mab climbed up with a bucket of paraffin and found the big feather lying on the lamp housing, still damp, its barbs fanned out like a hand. She carried it to the window. Out past the rock the flock was lifting, and where the feather's edge should have ended, the birds simply began, peeling away one by one until the last of them was a speck over the water.

She kept the feather on the sill for the rest of her life. When the boat finally came, she told the man it had been a gull that flew into the glass, and he wrote that down too. Mind your footing going down. The light is always the same light, and the birds only ever leave it in their own time.