Watercolour-style design of a dark feather fading from teal to purple, with the script words where you invest your love, you invest your life.

Feather with script quote in teal and purple

Colour · Flash

A dark feather lies diagonally across the image, its quill tapering to a fine point on the left and its vane feathering out to the right. Soft teal and purple watercolour washes and splatters sit behind and beneath the feather, with fine sketched barbs and shading along its length. Two lines of cursive script read where you invest your love, and you invest your life, set above and below the feather.

Feather Watercolour Script Quote Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third board, love, it's been loose since the winter we wintered in Wigan, and nobody's had the coppers to nail it. Sit where you can see the rigging. You want the story of Marguerite Vane and her feather, and I'll tell it the way she told it to me, with the lamps turned low and the tea going cold.

Keep reading

Marguerite flew for the Vane Brothers' Travelling Marvels for forty-one years. Her costume was black silk, and stitched into the wrap was a feather she'd plucked from a jackdaw that landed on her trapeze bar in Skegness, the morning the big top took its first gust. When the light caught the vane, teal and violet ran through it like oil on a puddle. The lads swore it was magic. She swore it was cheap dye from Leeds market.

Then the bank took the lions, then the generator, then the tent-men drifted off to building sites. Only Marguerite remained, and Eli, a boy of sixteen who could not tell a rope from a rumour. Every night she taught him the swing, and every night she recited the words she'd stitched inside her sleeve: where you invest your love, you invest your life. He thought it was a saying off a biscuit tin. She said she had handed out her heart like change her whole life, and it was the only currency that never rusted.

On the last night the sky over the field went the colour of a bruise. Eli caught her at the top of the swing, just as she'd taught him, and the feather worked loose from the silk and drifted down into the sawdust. He picked it up and pinned it to the rigging with a tent peg. Marguerite looked up at it trembling there, and said, "Still flying, then." It was the last show the Vanes ever gave.