Two matching feather tattoos on a forearm, one teal with the words Her Mother and one pink with the words Her Daughter, in a colour illustrative style with dotwork stippling.

Pair of colour feather tattoos with script

Dotwork · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two side-by-side photographs show a pair of matching feather tattoos on the forearm. The left feather is shaded in teal and blue with a white highlight, and the right is pink and red, both with fine black outlines, interior line detail and stippled dots around the quill. Each feather has handwritten script above it reading Her Mother and Her Daughter respectively.

Dotwork Lettering Forearm Feather Script Dot Quill Pair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are mending the net on the slip at Pennan when the wind lifts the first feather off the pile and drops it at your boot. It is teal, the colour of shallow water over sand, with a quill as long as your finger. Dorrie says it belongs to a gannet. You think it is a gull's, but she has never once been wrong about birds, only about men, and she taught you to read weather in the way a bird holds its wings.

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The Brenda Ann goes out at four, the first trip since the funeral, and you stand at the bow while she lifts under you like something remembering its name. Your mother used to tie feathers into the lining of your cap, pink from the terns, grey from the fulmars, all of them gone soft with salt. A feather tells you which way the wind has been, she said. You never believed her, but you still check the sky before you check the nets.

The haul comes up thin, a few stones of whiting and nothing you can sell with pride. On the way back, coiled in the bottom of the tub, you find a second feather, rose-red and dotted along the quill with tiny dark flecks, as if someone had flicked ink at it. Dorrie is smoking on the quay when you hold it up. She shrugs, the way she does when she has been keeping something that was never hers to keep.

That night you pin both feathers to the wheelhouse wall, one teal and one red, quills crossed like a pair of oars. By morning the wind has swung round to the north, which your mother would have called a good sign, and you go down to the slip to see who else is awake.