Black tattoo of a feather with a flock of small black birds rising from its tip, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather with birds on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black feather is tattooed on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with a trail of small black bird silhouettes lifting away from its tip towards the neck. The feather is shaded in black and grey with fine detail along its vane, and the birds are simple solid shapes of varying size. The woman is photographed from behind against a dark blue door, wearing a pink off-shoulder top, with her hair in a braid.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The galley on the Marigold Star has a porthole the size of a dinner plate, and this morning a feather came through it and landed in the flour bin. Grey at the tip, black along the spine, the kind a gull sheds when it has been caught in weather. I kept it. Cook's habit, I suppose: nothing on a ship goes to waste, not even a bit of bird.

Then yesterday, off the Dogger Bank, the starlings came. Hundreds of them, rising off the water like smoke pulled the wrong way, and they wheeled over the bow and went up past the mast until they were a scratch of ink against the sky. Mr Abernethy swore they were after the bread. I watched them thin out, a few at a time, until the last handful broke away from the rest and flew on alone towards the coast.

Here is the odd part. When I looked at the feather again, the spine had a little crease in it, as though it had been pulled from a wing in a hurry. I thought of your mother at the washing line, how she used to say a thing that's going somewhere always leaves a trail behind it.

Anyway, I'm sending the feather home with the post. Put it in the tin with the postcards from Gdansk. Tell the boys their father is fine, and that the bread was not stolen by starlings, whatever Abernethy says.

Your loving father, Tom

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