Small grey feather tattoo on the side of the ribs, below the arm, on a woman wearing a pink and white lace bikini.

Feather tattoo on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close, angled photograph of a woman's torso and side, with her face out of frame and hair falling across the top of the image. A small grey feather tattoo sits on the side of the ribs below the arm, drawn with fine lines and soft grey shading. The pink and white lace bikini and a navel piercing are visible, against a bright, pale background.

Ribs Feather Bikini Lace Navel piercing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ladder shifts on the wet grass of the bottom row at Pike's Piece, and Mr Ashdown tells you, not for the first time, to keep three rungs against the trunk. It is the last week of August and the Discovery apples are coming away so easily they knock together in the basket like coins dropped in a jar. You reach into the fork of a Bramley and your fingers close on something soft that is not fruit.

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It is a feather, grey as wet slate, caught in the bark where a wood pigeon must have brushed past at dawn. You turn it toward the sun. The shading runs from the quill outward, dark at the root and paling by degrees to nothing at the tip, as if someone had breathed on the paper and let the breath thin out. Ashdown squints down from the next tree and says a feather in the orchard means a bird has chosen the apples over the wood. You laugh, and then you tuck it behind the pencil you use for tallying crates, because it seems rude to leave it.

By four the press is ticking in the barn and the wasps have found the windfalls under the Worcester. You count forty-one crates onto the lorry and write the number in the ledger, and when you lift the pencil the feather slides out and lies across the column of figures like a bookmark. Ashdown's youngest, Nell, asks if she can keep it. You say no, and then, because her face drops, you say she can have it tomorrow.

On the bus home the windows are full of hedgerow, and the driver brakes hard at the bottom of Canon Hill. The feather lifts off your knee, turns once in the draught, and goes out through the gap at the top of the glass, grey against the green. You watch it until it is only a speck over the hop garden, and you do not reach for it, because by then you have already started counting the crates again in your head.