Two women seen from behind, each with a fine line black feather tattoo on the upper back, with small birds flying off the feathers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching feather and bird tattoos on backs

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two women are photographed from behind, each with a feather tattoo on the upper back below the shoulder blade. Small birds in flight trail up and away from the feather's tip, and the feathers are drawn with delicate black linework and light shading. The ink is entirely black and grey against pale skin, and the two designs are arranged side by side in a mirrored pairing.

Fine line Back Feather Bird Flock Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire is only good for a small story. You know the Hollin Ferry, where the river goes wide and brown before it meets the sea? Nobody has poled a boat across there since the new bridges went up. But in my grandmother's grandmother's time there were two ferry sisters, Ysolde and Mair, who kept the rope taut between the banks and quarrelled over it every morning like cats over a fish.

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One winter a grey heron came down into the reeds with a broken wing, and Mair splinted it and kept it alive until spring. When it finally rose, it left one long feather behind on the mud. Mair picked it up and pushed it through the buttonhole of her coat. Every dawn after that, the starlings came off the marsh in a black roar, and the feather would lift a little against the cloth, as if it remembered the sky better than she did.

Then Ysolde took the coastal job in the salt towns and the two of them stopped speaking. The ferry was lonely without the shouting. On the morning Ysolde's boat finally pulled away from the far bank, Mair stood at the landing, took the feather from her coat, and let it go into the wind. The starlings took it up in their roaring cloud, shaped it into a long thin stroke above the water, and carried it east, toward the sea.

A month later, a single starling landed on the ferry rope with a scrap of red thread knotted round its leg. Mair untied it and read the words scratched on the back of a tide chart: Send another. I can see them from here. So Mair did, every dawn, and the flock never once failed to find the way.