Black and grey feather tattoo on the lower back of a woman with her back to the camera, seated on a boat.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather tattoo on a lower back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair in a loose bun sits on the edge of a boat with her back to the camera, wearing a light blue strappy bikini top. A small black and grey tattoo, which looks like a feather with a crescent-shaped outline, sits on the side of her lower back. The soft focus background shows a lake and tree-lined shoreline under bright daylight.

Back Feather Crescent Lake Boat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tug's engine coughs somewhere under the deck, and you are sitting on the coaming with a mug going cold, watching the lock gates on the Kennet groan open. Your aunt Mags says the barge has never once started first time, and she is right, but you have stopped minding. The water below is brown and slow and holds the sky the way a pan holds soup.

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Along the towpath a heron has been standing in the reeds since dawn, and there is a feather in your coat pocket that came off a gull's wing near Newbury. You pick at the quill with your thumbnail. Mags wants to know why you keep turning it over. You tell her it looks like half a feather and half a moon, the same curve as the crescent on the lock-keeper's brass plate, the one that catches the light at dusk.

Dennis Pruett comes down the steps with a clipboard and a thermos. He says the river takes one feather a year off every boat that works it, and keeps the crescent for itself. You laugh. He doesn't. Then the gates close and the water rises beneath you, and the barge lifts slowly, like something waking up.

When the level matches the upper pound, you push the gate open yourself, leaning your weight against the beam until it swings. The feather slides out of your pocket and lands on the wet planks, face up, the grey barbs spread wide. You leave it there. Mags can say what she likes about litter. The river will take it back in its own time, and the lock will keep the crescent.