Greyscale realistic drawing of a feather with small birds rising into soft smoke, shown as a tattoo design on a white background, with no body placement visible.

Feather with birds rising in smoke

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A large feather runs diagonally from the bottom left to the upper right, with fine feather barbs and soft grey shading along its edges. Several small birds in flight rise from the feather's tip and drift into a cloud of smoke or mist that fades to white at the top right. The image is entirely black and grey on a plain white background, with no body part visible.

Realism Feather Bird Smoke Mist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stationmaster at Wrenfield kept a goose quill in his waistcoat pocket, because his mother had told him that a line is only as safe as the birds that watch it. Every morning he climbed the signal box steps and checked the wind with it, letting the feather go and reading where it fell.

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One November the smoke from the eight o'clock engine would not clear. It hung over the cutting like wet wool, and the signal lamps went grey inside it. A boy came running up from the goods yard with his cap in his hands and said the sparrows had gone quiet. The stationmaster went down with the feather and found the platform full of birds, sitting on the rails and the lamp posts, not one of them flying.

He did what his mother had done. He held the quill to the smoke and blew softly along its spine, the way you would blow dust off a page. The barbs lifted. Birds came off the feather one at a time, grey as the smoke they rose out of, and went up through the murk towards a patch of clean sky over the viaduct. The smoke thinned behind them like breath on a cold window.

The eight o'clock came in an hour late, its driver shaking. Nobody asked what had happened. The stationmaster kept the quill, and it is said that when a train is due in fog at Wrenfield, a feather will lie on the platform edge with its tip pointing the way the birds went.