Black and grey feather tattoo with fine linework and shaded barbs running along the outer side of a bare foot, on a wooden deck.

Feather tattoo on a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather runs diagonally up the outer side of a bare foot, from near the ankle towards the base of the little toe. The quill and barbs are drawn in fine black lines with soft grey shading that gives the feather some depth. The ink is black and grey only, and the foot sits against weathered wooden boards in a natural daylight setting.

Fine line Other Feather Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, no, sit nearer the fire, the wind up here takes half of what I say and gives back the wrong half. You want the feather. I will come to it, but you must first know the pass. Every October the geese came over the saddle between the two grey shoulders of Carn Dhu, and every October Morwenna climbed up from the lower farm to count them, because her father had lost nineteen sheep to the snow the winter before and would not sleep until someone had counted the living.

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One year the count came up short. A grey-bellied goose had dropped behind the flock, one wing hanging wrong, and it sat in the heather below the cairn with its neck bent like a question. Morwenna did not count it. She knelt, slid her coat over it, and carried it down the stony path with her boots skating on the scree. The goose bit her twice on the way. She let it.

It mended in the barn over the winter, eating oats from her palm. When it moulted, one long primary feather came loose, and she kept it, pressing it flat between the pages of her father's account book. Some nights she held it up to the lamp and turned it, and the barbs went from brown to silver to black depending on the angle, the way the cloud changes over the saddle before weather.

In spring the goose flew. She climbed up to watch it go, the feather in her coat pocket, and when the wind came over the cairn she took it out and let go. It did not fall. It rose over the scree, tilting, catching the light, and rode the gust up toward the saddle where the flock had gone. She did not count it. Not once, not even when it was gone from sight.