A woman with wavy blonde hair and a white vest top shows a dense grey forearm tattoo of abstract shapes, with a grey wing tattoo on her hip.

Forearm piece and hip wing tattoo

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her face hidden by wavy blonde hair stands by a window with a blurred city view behind her. A dense black and grey forearm tattoo of stacked, abstract shapes is shaded with fine detail, and a grey wing tattoo with feather shading sits on her hip above her denim shorts. The soft, muted lighting keeps the focus on the ink against pale skin.

Forearm Other Wing Abstract shape Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have worked the lost property hatch at Calder Junction for nineteen years, long enough to know that people mislay umbrellas on sunny days and their nerve on wet ones. On Tuesday a man in a grey coat sets a battered cardboard case on the counter and says it isn't his. Inside, under a folded tea towel, are forty-odd pigeon feathers, each pressed flat and labelled in a child's handwriting with a platform number.

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You ask where they came from. He shrugs and says a girl used to collect them from the footbridge over the down platforms every morning before the 7.12, and then one day she stopped coming. He wants you to keep them. You tell him you can't hold feathers for a stranger. He points at the sign above the hatch, UNCLAIMED PROPERTY HELD UNTIL COLLECTED, and says you're the only one left who reads the signs.

After he goes you carry the case into the back room and stack the boxes on the shelf: the crates of umbrellas, the single trainer, the violin without a bow. You build them into a tower that nearly reaches the strip light. Through the high window you can see the city piling itself up beyond the tracks, flats and warehouses and cranes, all of it grey in the early rain.

Next morning, at ten past seven, a girl stands on the footbridge looking down at the platform. You lift the hatch and wait. When she finally comes to the counter, you don't ask her name. You open the case, take out the feather marked 9 and set it on the wood between you, and she looks at it for a long time before she picks it up.