Black and grey shaded feather tattoo with cursive script across the lower back, above a patterned bikini bottom.

Feather with script quote on lower back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey feather runs diagonally across the lower back, with cursive script above it reading part of a sentiment about a piece of the heart forever. The feather has fine hatching and soft grey shading along its barbs, and the lettering is crisp and dark against warm skin. The frame is tightly cropped, with a colourful patterned bikini tie visible below the tattoo and the text partly cut off at the top edge.

Lettering Back Feather Script Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bride wanted the vows written out by hand, on paper from the same mill as her grandmother's stationery, and she wanted a goose quill rather than a fountain pen, because she said ink should have a little resistance. I told her the nib would split on any sentence longer than a name. She laughed and said that was exactly why she had booked me.

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I had been cutting quills for twenty years in a back room in Lewes, with a penknife and a magnifying lamp, and I knew which feathers from a left wing gave a firmer point. Her line was the last on the card: a piece of my heart, forever. Every couple wants a line like that, and I had written it perhaps forty times. Still, my hand stalled when I reached the word forever, because the nib had split and left a grey blot on the page, soft at the edges, like a feather lying flat on paper.

At the reception, the groom's nan found me by the trestle tables and asked whether I had cut the quill myself. I said I had. She pressed a small, pale feather into my palm, dark at the shaft, and told me it had come off her husband's pigeon loft roof the morning he proposed. She had kept it in her prayer book ever since. She did not say why, and she did not need to.

I still keep it on my bench under the lamp. Before I write anything with forever in it, I cut a fresh nib, slowly, and let the first stroke run out on scrap paper.