Feather tattoo across fingers and hand

Mind you, it was a grey October when the Patience came up the Trent with a cargo of slate and a girl aboard who would not say her name. Her father had been a waterman on the Ouse, and he had left her two things: a tin whistle with a cracked mouthpiece, and a heron's feather tied to a length of red wool. Every lock-keeper between Gainsborough and Torksey knew that feather, because she tied it to the mooring rope each evening, and in the morning it was always gone.

Now the lock-keeper at Cromwell, a man called Amos Dyer with more pride than sense, swore he'd catch whoever took it. So one night he sat on the lock gate with a lantern and a bottle of gin. Near midnight a grey shape came low over the water, not a heron but a great bird with black barbs at its wingtips, and it plucked the feather back from the rope, wool and all, and flew off upriver with it trailing like a kite string.

Amos followed it along the towpath for three miles. He never told anyone what he found at the end of it, only that he came back without his lantern and with one black feather stuck behind his ear, and that the girl on the Patience never tied the wool again. She went upriver herself after that, and when folk asked where she was bound, she only lifted her hand, two fingers spread like wings, and said, 'Where the water's still got something to carry.'