Black and grey shaded feather tattoos on both forearms of a person with long hair, whose clasped hands cover their face.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather tattoos on both forearms

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two large feather tattoos run down the forearms of a person whose clasped hands are held in front of their face. The feathers are shaded in black and grey, with fine lines along the vanes and soft tonal gradients that give them depth. The background is a pale tiled wall, and the person wears a checked shirt and sits in the foreground.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass me that water skin, and mind the lamp, it's the last of the paraffin. No, the one with the cork. There. Now sit closer, the wind's getting up and it likes to listen. You know the woman at Dry Well Crossing who kept two black feathers pressed under her cuffs? Everyone thought she was touched. Her husband had sold the wind to a tinker for a sack of salt, and the wind had never come back to the valley, so she went out after it with nothing but a pair of mule-hide gloves and a tin of soot.

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She walked the old road for nine days. Each dawn she drew a fresh feather on the inside of her wrists with that soot, shading it slow with her thumb so the vanes would hold, because a feather drawn well is a feather that can fly. On the tenth morning she found the tinker's cart stuck axle-deep in the flats, and the tinker sitting on the tailgate, mending a bellows that had no leather left in it. He looked at her wrists and laughed until he coughed.

"Wind's in the jar," he said, and pointed with his pipe. The jar was tied shut with a length of cord. She untied it and the desert went quiet, every grain of sand standing still. Then she held up her two drawn feathers and asked for one breath back, only one, to carry her home.

He gave her the breath, and she took it, and nobody at the crossing ever saw her again. But on still evenings the sand still lifts in two soft curls along the road, the way a bird opens its wings, and the children say that's her, practising.

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