Four black ink feather designs on a white background, the two larger ones patterned with dots, swirls and geometric motifs, shown as flash for a blackwork-style tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four decorative feathers in black ink

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

Four feathers are drawn side by side on a plain white background, varying in size and angle. The two on the left and right are filled with dense ornamental patterns of dots, swirls, triangles and a small snowflake-like motif, while the third feather is open with fine parallel linework. The image uses solid black ink only, with no shading beyond the line and pattern work.

Blackwork Feather Ornament Pattern Swirl Dot Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pour yourselves a cup and sit still, the lot of you, because this is the bit where Ronnie Pask always starts crying into the sponge. Fifty-one years ago this September, Miss Haddow sent four of us out behind the Methodist hall with a biscuit tin and told us to bring back whatever the wind had left. Ronnie came back with a crow's feather and a split lip. Alice brought a pheasant's, bronze and banded. Tom Gallagher, who never did a day's work in his life, came back with a gull's feather he'd nicked off the chapel wall. And I came back with a long white one caught in the railings, which I swear had not been on the ground at all.

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We sat in the infants' cloakroom with our biros and went at them. Alice put dots down her pheasant like her exercise books, and swirls up the spine, and Miss Haddow said it was a sin to spoil a thing God had already finished. Ronnie drew triangles in a row until the feather looked like a fence with its teeth out. Tom left his alone and called it honest. I left mine plain, because the white ones don't want much said about them.

So tonight, at the hall, with the urn rattling and the same stacking chairs, Alice unwrapped her pheasant from a paper napkin and it was faded to a sort of rust, and Ronnie's triangles had run where her tears went. Tom passed his gull's feather round the table like a hymn sheet. Nobody wanted to be the one who had to say the tin was gone.

But Miss Haddow's tin is in my handbag. I took it home in 1974 and never gave it back. Under the lid there was a fifth feather she must have slipped in herself, black on one side and white on the other, with a snowflake pricked into the quill. I have never told any of you. Go on, Tom. Hold yours up to the lamp and count the lines. You'll find there's one more than there was when we left.