Drawing of an infinity symbol tattoo design with a green and purple feather, small birds and the words love and family in script, shown on paper with no body placement.

Infinity feather with birds and love and family script

Fine line · Colour · Flash

A coloured pencil drawing of a tattoo design shows an infinity symbol with a feather running along its left loop and small birds in purple and teal flying along both loops. The words love and family are written in thin, flowing script on either side of the symbol. Colour fades from green and purple at the feather to blue and teal at the birds, against a pale paper background with pencils at the left edge.

Fine line Lettering Infinity Feather Bird Love Family Script Pencil drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last post leaves the Dunmore Street sorting office at eleven, and you are still on the kerb with a tin of seed under your arm when the first flock lifts off the bins behind you. Starlings, you think at first, then you catch the violet sheen on their wings and remember old Mr Haddow, who kept racing birds on the roof above the chippy and always said every bird that comes home has to be let go first.

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You walk the length of Hollins Lane with the seed tin rattling against your hip, past shuttered shops and a bus shelter where someone has scratched a phone number into the glass. Above the tramlines the birds bank and cross, teal where the streetlamps catch them, purple where the dark takes over. In your coat pocket is the letter that came on Thursday, unsigned except for two words in a thin, looping hand: come home. You have read it so often that the folds have gone soft as cloth.

The stairs up to the chippy roof groan under every step. The loft door sticks, then gives, and inside the cardboard boxes are still stacked where Mr Haddow left them, feathers loose across the boards like dropped pages. You open the hatch and the birds pour out in a rush, looping over the rooftops in a long figure that folds back on itself, over the canal, back past the station, around again.

You stay until they are only specks above the gasworks. Then you take the letter out, turn it over, and write one word on the blank side in the pencil stub you found in the loft. You tie it to the leg of the slowest bird with a length of green thread and let it go. It circles once above you, as if checking the address, and then it follows the others into the orange haze, carrying the only reply you have ever been able to think of.