Feather turning into flying birds

Colour · Flash

A pink and purple watercolour feather sits at the lower right, its quill extending down and its barbs softening into a loose trail of small bird silhouettes. The birds arc up and across the upper left of the composition, shrinking and fading in tone as they move away from the feather. The washes are soft and translucent, with darker edges and paler centres, on a plain white ground.

Feather Bird Flock Flying bird Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found its way under the awning by ten, so I gave up on the box of loose stationery and started tipping the nibs into tins instead. Saturday at the covered market in Halifax is mostly people who want to be out of the wet, and they drift past my table looking for something to hold while they wait for the bus.

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The girl stopped at the feather because it was the only thing I had left in the glass case. She was maybe nine, in a yellow anorak with the hood up, and she had a pound coin pressed flat in her fist. Aunt Bet dyed that feather herself, pink at the root and violet up the vane, for a Christmas card she never got round to sending. I told the girl it wasn't for sale. She asked what it was for, then, and I didn't have an answer that wasn't silly.

She said the barbs looked like they were coming loose and turning into birds. I looked properly for the first time in years. The tiny silhouettes running off the quill had been there all along, six or seven of them, fading as they climbed away from the page. I told her the feather was the mother and the birds were the children who had left home, and she nodded as if that were obvious.

She gave me the pound anyway, and I let her have the feather for the price of a cup of tea. When she left, the rain stopped, and the pigeons on the roof lifted all at once over the car park, pale and purple in the grey light. I counted them until I couldn't tell them apart from the clouds.