Black and grey realism tattoo of a shaded feather with script lettering and a flock of birds, on the side of the ribs.

Feather with birds and script on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large shaded feather runs diagonally across the side of the torso, with a quill line and soft grey gradients along its barbs. Script lettering follows the left edge of the feather, and a flock of small solid black birds rises from its upper right. The work is entirely black and grey, set against pale skin with a plain background.

Realism Lettering Ribs Feather Bird Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the gas is low and I won't be shouting over the trams. You want the one about Mrs Okonedo and her pigeons? Right, then. Every night in the bitter winter of the fog, she climbed the seven flights of Harrow Yard with a tin of crumbs under one arm and a candle cupped in her other hand, and she fed the birds off the lead gutter so the ones coming down from the mills would have something in them before the frost got into their feathers.

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One night a boy from the flats below followed her up the iron ladder. Tobias, his name was, nine years old, with his cap pulled down to his ears. His mother had gone to the infirmary on Dunmore Road and not come home in two days, and he'd been sitting on the parapet working out how far it was to the ground. Mrs Okonedo didn't tell him it was a silly thing to think about. She sat down beside him, shook out a crumb, and took a grey feather from the lining of her coat, the only one she owned, from a bird her husband had brought home long before he died.

She pressed it into his palm and told him to hold it into the wind and say the words her grandmother had written inside her hatbox, the ones about strength and flying away. He asked her what they meant. She said he'd find out when the wind did the talking. He held it up, mumbled them, and the wind came off the river and took the feather right out of his fingers. Then the birds lifted off the gutter all together, a whole black scatter of them, and the feather went up among them until nobody could say which was which. Tobias went down the ladder that night, and the next morning his mother was standing in the yard, waiting for him.