Black and grey feather tattoo with orange and red accents and a braided band above it, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feathers with a braided band on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Three feathers hang from a black woven band across the upper arm. The feathers are shaded in black and grey with orange, yellow and red highlights along the quills. The band has a braided pattern with small red and beige details, and the photo is taken close up against a white ribbed top.

Upper arm Feather Armband

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the feathers in the wet grass under the old Bramley trees before the pickers come up the lane, three of them stuck together with dew. Your uncle Ivor says the jays come down for the windfalls the way neighbours come to a funeral, loud and unwelcome, and that you should leave what they lose. You pocket them anyway and carry them to the barn in your fist, warm from your hand by the time you open it.

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That evening you sit on the tailgate of the flatbed with the cord Ivor's wife plaited for you the summer before she died, black and tight as a bootlace, two rust-red beads threaded through it a thumb's width apart. You work the quills into the weave one at a time. The orange stripe takes the low sun through the Kingston Black leaves and holds it. Ivor watches from the barn door and says nothing, which from Ivor is a blessing.

By morning the wasps have found the fallen fruit and the ladder rungs are tacky with juice. The radio in the packhouse plays something from 1987 that nobody asks to change. You walk along the hedge where the jay has been shouting all week and tie the band to the lowest bough, the three feathers lifting when the wind comes off the Malvern hills.

The jay arrives before you reach the gate. It lands on the cord, tilts its head at the red beads, and takes the orange feather first, as though it has been waiting to be asked. You stand in the rows with your hands empty and listen to it go off over the cider apples, shouting the whole way.