Six-panel collage of feather tattoos in black ink on ribs, collarbone, back, ankle and neck, some with flying birds and one with script.

Feather tattoos in six placements

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

This collage shows six close photographs of feather tattoos on different parts of the body, including the ribs, collarbone, upper back, ankle and neck. Some designs use fine, delicate linework with small birds scattered above the feather, while the larger back piece is shaded in greys to give the quill a realistic, dimensional look. All the tattoos are in black and grey ink, and the panels are arranged in a grid with the script on the middle-left panel reading as part of the design.

Fine line Realism Lettering Ribs Chest Back Ankle Neck Feather Bird Script Quill Collage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The starlings came over the top field the week the thaw failed, and Mary Ashby stood in the yard with the feed bucket and counted them until the number ran out of her head. Her husband had always said a murmuration was the sky deciding something. He said it kindly, the way he said most things, and he had been dead two winters.

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Down in the lower field a jackdaw sat on the gatepost with one wing held wrong, and every morning it was there, watching the hedge where the flock slept. Mary left crusts on the post and the bird came for them. On the third morning she found a long grey feather caught in the wire, soft at the root, and she tucked it into her apron without thinking why.

The old folk on the road said a feather kept in the house brought the birds back to the roof. Her neighbour's boy, Eli, laughed at that and then asked to hold it. By spring he had carried it to the mill town in his coat, where a woman with a lamp was said to read the weather in the gulls. He came back with a coin and a message in pencil on the back of a seed packet: the flock would winter where the bread was, and the jackdaw would mend.

Mary never did learn whether the message was true. But in February the starlings lifted off the top field all at once, bent east, and came down on her roof like a cloth thrown over a line. She stood under them with the bucket empty, and for once she did not count.