Black and grey tattoo of two feathers forming an infinity symbol on the upper back, below the shoulder, photographed in black and white.

Infinity feathers on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo shows two feathers curved together to form an infinity symbol. The linework is fine and the quills are defined, with soft shading on the barbs that gives the feathers depth. The tattoo sits on the upper back beside the shoulder blade against a plain pale background, with the subject's dark hair pulled up and her face turned away from the camera.

Back Feather Infinity symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, because the bell is cracked and I will only tell this once before Vespers. Brother Oswin kept the scriptorium at Llanddwyn in the years when the rain came sideways off the bay. He was a careful man with ink and hated waste, so when a pair of jackdaws built their nest in the eaves above his desk and feathers came drifting down onto the vellum, he gathered every one and laid them in a copper dish.

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Two of them were long and grey-tipped, pulled from the same wing by a gust that had flung them through the shutter. He tried to lay them side by side to dry, but the quills kept slipping, and each time he nudged them they curled round one another like sleeping dogs. By the time the bell rang for Lauds he had bound their bases with a thread of red silk, and they made the sideways figure you see carved on the old stone crosses, the shape that never starts and never ends.

The abbot found it on the desk and called it a heresy, then a trinket, then a thing to be thrown into the bay. Oswin brought it back from the rocks each time. Every morning after that the loop was on the windowsill again, dry and perfectly bent, though the latch had been fastened all night.

So the abbot let him keep it. When Oswin died the feathers were still there, and the brothers say the loop is in the tower yet, lying where the first sun comes in, bent so neatly that no one can find where one feather ends and the other begins.