Black and grey pencil-style drawing of a feather dissolving into flying birds, with the script words sometimes you gotta fall before you fly running along the shaft, shown as a tattoo design.

Feather turning into birds with script

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil-style drawing of a feather whose shaft breaks into a trail of birds in flight, rising towards the upper right. The feather has fine hatched linework and soft grey shading, and the birds are drawn in simple dark silhouettes. A line of cursive script runs along the feather and the flight path against a plain pale background.

Realism Lettering Feather Bird Script Quote Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The loft on Tern Deck had been empty for eleven years when Ines found the feather wedged behind the vent grille, grey as ash and still stiff at the quill. Nothing aboard the Halloran was supposed to moult. We had kept the last birds in the hydroponic ring for seed counting, and when the hull cracked over Callow Reach, the cages went out with the spare air tanks, because the ship's reckoning called birds mass we could not afford.

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She brought it to me on the galley bench and turned it under the strip light the way the old archivists used to turn coins. "It's been used," she said. "Somebody flew with this." I told her that was nonsense, and then I told her about my grandmother's doves in a tin shed on a farm that no longer existed, because the words came out before I could stop them. Ines had the look of someone who would not let a thing go until it had been argued down properly, and I had never once won that argument.

We rode the lift to the bow blister, where the black beyond the glass was so complete it looked painted on. Ines held the feather to the pane and opened her fingers. It did not drop. It turned once in the draught from the vent, and the shaft split along its length, and the barbs lifted into five small dark shapes that wheeled above the consoles, climbed past the light of the reach, and were gone into the ventilation with a sound like someone tapping a glass.

The reckoning, when I checked it later, said the ship was two hundred grams lighter. It was right, as it always is. When the lift came back down I found Ines still at the blister with her hand flat on the cold pane, and her palm was dusted grey, as if the feather had left a little of itself behind, which I suppose it had.