Fine line black feather tattoo on the side of a person's ribs, with a dark top lifted beside it.

Feather tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather is drawn in black ink on the side of the ribcage, curving diagonally from upper left to lower right. The linework is thin and varied, with fine strands and loose curled edges that suggest the soft barbs of a feather. The ink is solid black with no colour, set against smooth skin and a dark fabric held up by a hand at the top of the frame.

Fine line Ribs Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gale had flattened the nets along the Skerrow slipway overnight, and by six I was on my knees on the wet boards, picking knots out of tarred cord with a bent nail. That was where the feather found me, snagged in the mesh like a bit of thread someone had forgotten to cut.

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It was a dark one, near black in the grey light, its spine bowing out then sweeping down to a point as fine as a darning needle. Some of the barbs had come loose along one side and curled back on themselves, so it looked less like something dead than something still deciding whether to lift. My father would have said a gull lost it fighting over the herring boats. I pushed it into the pocket of my oilskin anyway, where it stayed all morning, tickling my hip every time I bent.

At noon Tomas Wren came down the steps with the ferry's cracked rudder bar under his arm and asked whether I'd seen his good pliers. I hadn't. He sat on the bollard to wait for the tide and told me about the winter his mother knitted him a jumper with a feather stitch down the front, how it unravelled the first time he wore it to the Anchor. I laughed until I had to hold the net still. Then I took the feather out and laid it across my palm, and he said it looked pulled out in flight rather than lost.

I tucked it into the tide table book by the wheelhouse door, where the page for the month always falls open at the spring tides. The wind swung round before dawn and the nets were dry by the time I came back, and I found myself checking the book, half expecting the feather to have lifted off the page and gone back out over the harbour wall.