Black and grey tattoo design of a shaded feather that breaks apart into a flock of bird silhouettes rising upward, shown on a white background.

Feather dissolving into flying birds

Black and grey · Flash

A shaded feather runs diagonally up the left side of the image, its quill visible and its barbs fading into a loose cluster of small flying birds. The feather has fine, detailed hatching, while the birds are solid black silhouettes in varied wing positions. The design is shown in black and grey on a plain white background.

Feather Bird Flock Flight Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your brother's feather is still in your coat pocket when the wind comes over the col, and you know by the way the sheep lift their heads that the weather will shut before the bell at Scarth Ford rings noon. Keep walking. Hold the crook low, the way Dad taught you, and count the ewes at the stone wall twice, because the second count is always the true one. Tomas found that feather under the rowan last autumn and pressed it into your hand with a grin, saying it would carry you out of the valley when you were ready. You never believed him.

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The fieldfares rise before you reach the cairn, a loose scatter coming off the scree like something spilt. You stop. Your fingers have gone stiff inside the gloves, so you draw the feather out to warm it against your palm, and that is when you see the vanes lifting at their edges. They fray into threads, and each thread lets go of the grey stem and turns, quick and dark, into a bird. One after another they peel away and climb past you, wings clicking in the thin air.

They go over the pass in a wheeling tangle, black against the breaking cloud, dozens and then hundreds, until the quill lies bare across your palm and the wind has nothing left to take. You think of the ewes, the ford, the stove banked low at home. You try the count again and it comes out wrong, which is somehow what you expected up here.

Below you, the first flakes begin to fall. You go down after them slowly, the empty quill held carefully in your fist, and you do not look back at the empty sky.