Pencil drawing of two feathers curling around a rose and vine swirls, a botanical tattoo design shown on plain white paper with no body placement.

Feathers and a rose tattoo design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two feathers, one large and curved at the top and a smaller one angled below it, with a rose at the lower left and curling vine-like swirls beside it. The feathers are built from fine hatched strokes that give them soft shading, while the rose uses layered petal outlines and grey shading for depth. The design is rendered entirely in black and grey on a white background and fills a tall, portrait-shaped composition.

Botanical Realism Feather Rose Vine Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the pot, because I'm not telling this twice. Forty years I cooked aboard the Mary Ellen Cross, and the galley had a hook by the stove where a grey feather hung from a nail, tied up with tarred twine. Nobody knew who put it there. The boy who swept the deck said it was the cook before me, and the cook before him swore it was the boatswain's, but I'll tell you what I know, which is that it was the only thing aboard that never got greasy.

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The winter we ran into the Dogger Bank fog, the ship lost her bearings for three days. Captain Hollis wanted the bread baked fresh every watch, so I was at the oven at four in the morning when the boy came down white as flour. He said there was a red rose growing out of the port rail, bright as a lamp in all that grey, with a feather lying across it like a letter somebody had forgotten to post. I laughed at him. Then I climbed the ladder myself.

There was no rose, of course, only a coil of old rope wound round a bollard and a tangle of wet spray on the wire. But the feather was there, a big one curved like a question mark, and beside it a smaller one leaning in as if to read over its shoulder. I carried the big one below, and the fog lifted by noon. Captain Hollis never asked where the bread came from that morning, and I never told him.

I still have the feather. It hangs where the other one hung, and when the swell gets up it turns on its twine like it's looking for something to bring home. Eat your supper now. The bread's fresh.