Black and grey tattoo design of a shaded feather with a flock of birds lifting away from its upper tip, on a white background.

Feather dissolving into flying birds

Black and grey · Flash

A shaded feather runs diagonally from the lower left, with its quill and barbs drawn in fine grey tones. Its upper tip breaks apart into a flock of black silhouetted birds in various flight poses that rise toward the top right. The design is black and grey on a plain white background with no visible skin.

Feather Bird Flight Silhouette Flock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes Moor had counted the rooks of Carrow Keep every dusk for thirty-one winters, standing on the broken curtain wall, because the last steward had told her that a ruin without a count was only a heap of stones. The roof had gone before she was born. The rooks came home to the empty hall each evening like tenants paying rent they did not owe. Nineteen, she wrote in the ledger, and the ink froze on the nib.

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On the wall that evening lay a feather, grey and long as her forearm, its quill split at the root. She had not seen it fall. She picked it up and the barbs were cold and faintly damp, the way things are after rain has passed through them. Along its edge the soft fringe lifted in the wind off the dale, and she noticed that it was moving on its own, each thin branch loosening, curling, and lifting free.

The feather came apart from the tip downward. Each piece was a bird, black against the lemon sky, and they rose over the keep and turned once above the hall where the rooks slept. Agnes did not let go. She held the quill in both hands while the last barbs peeled away and left her with a bare shaft and a sore palm.

She opened the ledger to the page and wrote the count, which was nothing, since there were no rooks in the hall and no birds on the wall. Then she sat down on the cold stone and waited. When the flock wheeled back once more, she counted them up to thirty-one, one for each winter, before they took the dale road north and were gone.