Black and grey realism feather tattoo shaded along the side of the ribs, with a navel piercing and denim jeans visible below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather tattoo on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded feather with a curved shaft and fine barbs sits diagonally across the side of the ribcage, below the breast. The black and grey shading gives the quill soft gradients and a three-dimensional look. The photograph is black and white and cropped at the neck and upper thigh, with a navel piercing and dark denim jeans in the lower frame.

Realism Ribs Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gull's feather came down on the slipway the morning after the Mary Jane went out and didn't come back in. My father had been gone two nights by then, and Mrs Tregenza from the chandlery said the sea didn't give things back in a hurry, so I should stop looking at the water. I didn't stop. I went down every tide with a bucket and a pair of tongs, the way he taught me to clear the weed from the harbour steps.

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The feather was grey at the root and near black at the tip, the shaft bent like a question mark where it had hit the stones. It was the kind of feather a gull loses in a gale, all its barbs still tight together, and I carried it up the hill in my fist without really deciding to. Mum put it in a jam jar on the windowsill. She said it was bad luck to keep a bird's feather indoors, and then she went on keeping it there.

Ten days later the lifeboat crew brought him in on the Thursday evening tide, alive and cursing about a split fuel line. Nobody believed me when I said I'd known from the feather, so I stopped saying it. But every morning I still tip the jar over my palm, feel the weight of it, and watch the light come through the barbs. It lifts when the door opens. It always does.