Close-up of a soft blue and pink shaded feather tattoo on a person's lower abdomen, above black lace underwear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pastel feather on the lower abdomen

Other · Colour · Photo

A single feather is tattooed diagonally across the skin of the lower abdomen, with its quill running from upper left to lower right. The feather is rendered with soft shading and pale blue, green and pink tones that fade toward its edges. A navel piercing and the black lace waistband of underwear sit in the frame, with the tattoo as the clear focal point.

Other Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dyer's yard in Ostia stinks of alum by the time the sun clears the warehouse roofs, and you are already late with the wool. Your master, Lucius Varro, does not look up from the vats when you come in. He only points his stick at the crate the fishermen brought from the salt marsh and says the gulls are no good to him, but the heron plumes might be worth boiling down for a paler blue.

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You sort them on the trestle table, pale ones to the left, grey to the right. One long primary has caught the light from the high window and seems to hold three colours at once: sea green along the spine, a milky blue through the vane, and a faint rose where the barbs thin toward the tip. You have never seen a dye do that. You hold it against the steam from the woad vat and it blurs, so you lay it flat on a clean linen cloth instead, the way Mira showed you before the Corinth factor bought her away.

Varro comes over with his sleeves rolled and tests the feather between finger and thumb. He calls it a sparrow's, worth nothing, and tells you to put it in the lighter vat with the rest. You nod and say nothing, because you have learned that a thing kept quiet is a thing you still own.

At dusk he counts the bundles and comes up one short. He does not search for it. He has never once looked closely at anything you have kept.