Black fine line tattoo of a feather that breaks up into a flock of flying birds, placed on the inner ankle.

Feather dissolving into flying birds on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A feather runs diagonally up the ankle and breaks apart into a flock of small black birds in flight, with the birds trailing up and across the skin towards the top of the frame. The feather has fine detailed barbs and a solid shaft, while the birds are rendered as solid silhouettes with no interior detail. The tattoo is entirely black ink on lightly tanned skin, with the leg filling most of the frame against a dark leather-like background.

Fine line Ankle Feather Bird Flock Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The jackdaws had taken the solar again, so Maud climbed the broken stair with a broom and a bad temper. Half the roof was gone. Rain had pooled in the window embrasures and greened the flagstones, and when she shouldered through the door the birds lifted from the rafters in one black rush, showering her with grit and old straw.

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She would have cursed them properly if her eye hadn't caught on the arrow slit. A feather was wedged in the mortar there, long and grey-black, its barbs so fine they caught the light like smoke. Her brother Edwin had flown goshawks from this keep before the estate was sold and the mews were left to the nettles. He had gone north to the wool towns with a bag over his shoulder and had sent nothing since but a single letter, which she had burned for the warmth.

She pulled the feather free and turned it over. The shaft was solid as a bone needle. Outside, the jackdaws were wheeling above the curtain wall, and as she watched, the feather began to tremble in her fingers. Its tip frayed, then its edges, and then it was not a feather at all but a loosening of small dark shapes that lifted from her palm one after another, each wing snapping open, until a flock of birds streamed out through the slit and rose over the gatehouse into the wind.

Maud stood with the broom at her feet for a long while. Then she tore a page from the rent ledger, wrote one line on it in pencil, and weighted it under a stone on the gatehouse sill. By the time she reached the courtyard the flock had thinned to a few specks above the moor, heading north, and the sky over the ruin was empty and very wide.