Dark ink drawing of a feather quill dipping into a splashing ink pot, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather quill dipping into an ink pot

Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a large feather quill curving down from the top of the image into an open ink pot at the bottom. Ink splashes and drips from the pot's neck and base, and the feather and bottle are drawn with smooth solid fills and soft grey shading. The image is monochrome with a faint purple tint, set against a plain white background.

Feather Quill Ink Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The scribe of Holm Cross had a habit that the parish did not forgive. Every winter, when the lamps were lit early and the river ran black under the mill, she took her quill from the crow's-wing drawer and went down to the old well by the tithe barn. Nobody saw her dip it. They only saw the ink in the morning, spilt across the bottom of the pail like a spill of night, and the feather lying on the cobbles as if it had flown there and thought better of it.

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The miller's boy, Tobias, was the one who went looking. He was ten and believed in nothing he could not carry home. He found the well dry, the rope rotted, and in the mud a stoppered pot of green glass with a cork shaped like a thumb. When he pulled the cork the smell was of iron and oak galls, and the feather in his other hand lifted of its own accord and pointed north, towards the high moor where the Ashby brothers had been fighting over a boundary stone for forty years.

He carried the pot up the hill in his coat. At the stone he found the two old men sitting either side of it, neither speaking, their hands folded in their laps and their shoulders grey with frost. He uncorked the pot and tipped a little ink onto the stone. It ran into the cracks in the rock and drew a line, neat and thin, that split the moor exactly down the middle. Both brothers stared at it. Neither of them, afterwards, could say whose side of the line they had been standing on.

In spring the scribe came back for the pot. She took it from his hands, looked at the feather he had kept, and smiled without much warmth. "Good," she said. "Now you know what a true settlement costs." Then she dipped the quill in the ink, shook it once, and wrote the boy's name in the parish book, under the word *witness*.