Pencil drawing of a grey feather looping through a yellow ribbon, with small black birds flying off from its tip, shown on a grey paper background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather, yellow ribbon and birds design

Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing a grey and black feather curving through a yellow awareness-style ribbon loop. A flock of small black birds lifts away from the feather's tip towards the right. The feather uses pencil-like shading and fine hatched linework, and the ribbon is coloured in yellow against the grey background.

Feather Ribbon Bird Flock Awareness ribbon

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at the desk turned my passport over twice, as if the photograph might change its mind if she waited. Behind me the coach idled with its engine ticking, and somewhere in the queue a child was counting the lamps along the fence out loud. 'Purpose of travel?' she asked. I told her I was carrying a feather to my brother, which was true in the way most things at borders are true.

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She asked to see it. I opened my hand and the grey quill lay across my palm, its vanes combed out by three weeks in my coat pocket. It came from the gull Tomas found on the breakwater at Ostend, the one tangled in yellow line that the harbour men had been warning everyone about. He had worked the line off its leg with his teeth and his patience, then let the bird go, and the feather had dropped at his feet like a receipt.

She turned it in the light, looking for something to declare. 'It's for a ribbon,' I said, which made no sense, so I explained that Tomas wanted the quill inked beside a yellow loop, and that the artist would match the curve to the feather's spine. She nodded slowly, the way people do when they have decided to believe a small lie for the sake of the queue behind.

She stamped the page and handed back the passport, then the feather, which she had held so carefully I understood she had kept something of her own. Past the barrier, a flock lifted off the saltmarsh and bent its line across the sky, as though nobody had told them where the border was.