Black and grey shaded feather quill with a pen nib and a line of small text beneath it, tattooed on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Feather quill and quote on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded feather quill with a pen nib at its tip sits diagonally across the upper back near the shoulder blade. The feather uses fine, soft grey shading and detailed barbs, with curled wisps at the base of the nib. Beneath it, a short line of serif text in dark grey ink reads as a quotation, and a striped strap runs along the right edge of the frame.

Realism Lettering Back Shoulder Feather Quill Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Ambrose Tilling had been Secretary to the Ladies' Mutual Almanac Society for nineteen years, and in all that time he had never once been asked to account for a spoon. So when the Committee gathered in the back parlour above the Cheapside chandler's, with the gas turned low and the minutes already open, he dipped his pen and waited for the matter to be raised.

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The matter concerned Mrs Hester Pym, who had been seen leaving the Thursday supper with a silver teaspoon folded into her muff. Nobody had quite seen it go in. Tilling had seen the muff, and the muff had seen the spoon, and he had made a note of both. The Committee wished to know whether the spoon belonged to the Society, or to Mrs Pym by long custom, or simply to itself.

Mrs Pym arrived late, damp from the rain, and laid a folded sheet on the green baize. It was a letter from her late husband's solicitor, dated 1861, promising her whatever she liked from the plate chest in recompense for the Tuesday of the flood. Tilling read it twice. He looked at the spoon, then at the wet hem of her coat, then at the nib he had not yet lifted from the page.

He wrote in the minutes, in his neatest copperplate: Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon. Then, after a long moment, he added a colon, because it seemed to him that some matters ought to be left open for the next meeting.