Pencil drawing of a feather with birds lifting away from its tip and a script quote running along the shaft, shown in black and grey.

Feather with birds and script quote

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a feather curving up from the bottom left, with its shaft and barbs shaded in fine hatched strokes. Small silhouetted birds rise from the upper part of the feather, with the largest bird at the top right, and a line of cursive script follows the curve of the feather. The image is entirely black and grey on a white background.

Feather Bird Flight Script Quote Pencil drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock at Thornbury Cut has been fighting you since March, and today the gate sticks again, so you are up to your knees in brown water with the windlass in both hands and the mooring line singing taut behind the boat. Your brother shouts from the tiller that you are letting the bow drift. You are. From down here, between the wet brick walls, you can see only a strip of sky above the towpath, and across it a murmuration of starlings is lifting off the poplars all at once, as if someone had shaken out a grey cloth.

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Ma kept a pigeon's feather tucked into the frame of the wheelhouse calendar. She said a feather was only a feather until the bird had gone on without it, and then it was a kind of map. You never knew which part of the map she meant. She used to say the trick of the river was not strength but timing, knowing when to lean on the gate and when to let the water do the work, and that a body had to be willing to get soaked to learn the difference.

The ratchet slips. The windlass jerks free, the gate groans open an inch, and you go under the green slick of the coping with your boots full of cold. When you come up your brother is laughing so hard he has to hold the tiller with his knee, and the boat has drifted a full length past the lock mouth, into the eddy where the swans sit.

You drag yourself onto the stone and lie there, dripping, watching the starlings turn over the poplars and drop, and then rise again, every one of them somehow agreeing where to go. Later, back in the wheelhouse, you will find the calendar, and the old grey feather still stuck in its frame, and you will not take it out. You will simply sit down beside the stove, wet to the bone, and wait for the next lock.