Black and grey tattoo of a feather breaking into a flock of birds, with a ribbon loop behind it, on a leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather dissolving into birds with ribbon

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A feather with fine barbs runs diagonally across the skin, and its lower section breaks apart into a flock of small birds drifting to the left. A large ribbon loop sits behind the feather, outlined with solid black shading and lighter grey highlights. The tattoo is entirely black and grey and is framed against plain skin and a white cloth.

Other Feather Bird Flock Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marjorie,

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The rain came in over the car park at half eleven, the way it always does when the stall is half unpacked, and I had to shove the whole box of paperbacks under the trestle before they swelled. You'd have laughed. A man in a yellow cagoule stood under my awning for twenty minutes, turning over a bird guide with its spine split, and he never once asked the price. He just kept saying the names under his breath: starlings, redwings, a fieldfare he wasn't sure of.

When he finally bought it, he handed me a folded fifty and told me to keep the change for the tea urn. Then he tucked a grey feather from his coat pocket into the page where the swifts were. He said he'd found it on the canal towpath that morning, and it was the sort of feather that makes you think a bird has let go of something on purpose. I didn't know what to say, so I told him swifts were the ones that never land. He nodded as if that was the answer he'd come for.

After he left, the sky opened for ten minutes, a thin bright strip over the bus station, and a flock of small birds lifted off the bins behind the fish van and went chattering west over the roofs. I stood with the feather between my fingers and watched them break apart and gather again, like a loose thread pulled from a jumper. I've put the feather in the tin with the good scissors. Come Saturday and I'll show you. Bring your own umbrella.

Yours in damp paper, Pat