Black ink fine line infinity symbol with a shaded feather that breaks into scattered dots, and the word free in script, on the side of the ribs.

Infinity symbol with feather and the word free

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A fine line infinity symbol loops across the skin, with a shaded feather lying along its left loop and tapering into scattered dots towards the top left. The word free is written in cursive script on the right loop. The piece is rendered in black ink with grey shading on the feather, photographed straight on against pale skin.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Infinity symbol Feather Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The eagle dropped its feather on the Scarth path the same week Tom announced he was leaving, and my father said the mountain was making a joke at our expense. We were carrying salt up to the high huts in October, the first snow already skinning the tops, and Tom walked ahead with his collar up, talking about the lowland towns where a man could sell cheese without climbing for his living.

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At the cairn he stopped and pulled the feather from between two stones. It was grey-brown, darkened near the quill as though someone had pressed a thumb into the vane. 'Take it,' I said, 'it's bad luck to leave a feather on a pass.' He turned it over in his fingers, and then the wind came off the north face hard enough to lift the snow in sheets. When it cleared he was already a small dark mark on the far slope, and I had to follow him down with the sacks still on my back.

I found him at the lip of the gully, feather in hand, watching a flock of starlings come over the col. There were hundreds of them, bending and splitting and joining again, and as they passed over us they seemed to pour off the feather the way smoke leaves a dying fire. Tom said that was the trouble with this pass. You climbed to get out of the valley, and it simply looped you back to the same stone, like a rope knotted round the hill.

He gave me the feather at the bottom of the gully. I still keep it in a tin with the salt-stained tally sticks. Some winters I think I should have held on to him, and some winters I think the birds were right to carry him over the top. On the cairn stone I scratched the one word we had both wanted, and by morning the snow had filled it in.