Black and grey infinity symbol tattoo with a shaded feather, the words life and love in script and birds scattering below, on a limb.

Infinity feather with life and love script

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded feather runs through an infinity loop, with the word life in cursive script on the left loop and love on the right. Small bird silhouettes drift down and away from the lower edge of the feather. The linework is fine and clean, the feather is shaded in soft greys, and the design is centred on a smooth patch of skin.

Fine line Realism Other Infinity Feather Life Love Script Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is low and the wind is at the shutters again. You want the story of Maud Tallis and the feather, or the story of the birds? They are the same story if you listen long enough, and tonight you will listen.

Keep reading

Maud kept the light on Skerra, a rock so small the gulls argued over it. Her husband Ivo rowed cheese and eggs across to the mainland every Thursday, and one March he did not row back. Three days later she found a grey feather on the path to the lamp, long as her forearm, its tip frayed like wet rope. She threaded it onto a loop of tarred twine and knotted the ends together, because she could not bear a line that simply stopped.

Every dusk after that, the redshanks and the little brown finches lifted off the shingle and streamed out over the water, scattering like ash from a pipe. Maud counted them the way the ferrymen counted fares. She told the children that each bird carried a word out past the reef, and that the loop meant the words would never run out. Life on one side, love on the other, and the bend between them where you could not tell which was which.

The winter she was too stiff for the cliff path, a lad from the mainland came to mend the lamp and found the feather in her apron pocket. He asked her what it said. Maud took it from him, turned it once in the lamplight, and handed it back. 'Read it either way,' she said. 'It only ever means the one thing.' Out past the reef a flock lifted from the water, and he watched them go until the light had nothing left to show him.