Black and red lettering design reading Once upon a time in blackletter script, with a black feather dissolving into flying birds, drawn as a tattoo design on a pale background.

Once upon a time feather and birds design

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

The design shows the words Once upon a time in blackletter lettering, with a large ornate red capital O and a red swash above it. A black feather lies beneath the text, its quill tapering to the left and its vane breaking up into a flock of small black birds that rise towards the upper right. The feather is shaded with fine hatched lines, while the lettering and birds are solid black on an off-white parchment-style background.

Lettering Feather Bird Text Flock Swash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The quill had been Mother Harrow's, and she had never let anyone else touch the ink. Every winter she sat by the stove in the caravan behind the fairground, writing down what the travelling people brought her: a dropped glove, a bet lost on the big wheel, the name of a child who had run off with the ghost train's organ grinder. The pages went into a tin box, and the tin box went wherever the fair went.

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The spring the carousel was sold for scrap, she found a black feather on the windowsill of the ticket booth. It was long and glossy, and the barrel of its quill had been split clean by a knife. Nobody in the fairground could say which bird had lost it. Mother Harrow dipped the quill in the ink jar, held it over the first blank line of the new book, and waited for the story to decide where to begin.

It began, as stories do, with a girl named Idony who climbed the scaffolding of the Ferris wheel each dusk to count the crows that roosted on its spokes. She counted nine on the first night and eleven on the second. On the third, the feather in Mother Harrow's hand twitched, and the whole flock lifted from the iron and wheeled off over the field, scattering themselves into the dark like loose ink.

When the caravan was packed up in the morning, the only thing left on the page was a line in red at the top, curling like a question. Mother Harrow closed the book, locked the tin box, and went to find the girl. The crows had gone east, and the fair was going west, and somebody, she supposed, would have to tell them the ending was still being written.