Black fine line feather tattoo on the side of the ribcage, with wispy barbs drawn in thin, sweeping strokes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single black feather is tattooed diagonally on the side of the ribcage, with the curled tip near the top and the quill sweeping down towards the lower edge. The linework is fine and sketchy, with thin strokes varied in weight and some soft shading along the shaft. The ink is black on pale skin, and a dark garment held up at the top edge frames the image against a tiled wall.

Fine line Ribs Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The feather had caught on the mooring chain of the Maud Ellen, curled at the tip like a question nobody had asked, and Nell Carew lifted it free before the tide could take it back. She carried it up the slipway in her closed fist, past the nets and the upturned dinghies, until she reached the chandlery where Amos Tregear kept the harbour log in the room above the stove.

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Amos took the feather from her with two fingers, as though it might still be warm. Gull, he said, though it was too long for a gull and too dark. Shearwater, maybe, blown in off the headland during the squall on Tuesday night. He turned it to the window. The barbs had parted along the shaft in long fine threads, each one going its own way, and still the whole thing held its slanting line as if it had somewhere to be.

The log lay open at Tuesday. Beneath the entry for the wind backing south-west there was a blank space where the Maud Ellen should have been recorded as in, and it had stayed blank for three days. Nell had been waiting for someone else to fill it. Amos dipped the quill end of the feather in the ink pot, tested the nib on the blotter, and passed it across the table without a word.

She wrote slowly. The strokes skipped where the vane had worn thin, and the ink pooled at the curl. When she had finished, she let the tip of the quill trail a small hooked flourish under her father's name, the way the feather had hooked round the chain, and she left the page to dry with the wind rattling the shutters.