Black fine line peacock feather tattoo on the side of the ribs, with lettering in an invented script running beside it.

Peacock feather and lettering on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black peacock feather with a detailed eye and curling barbs is drawn in fine, mostly uniform linework on bare skin at the side of the torso. A line of black lettering in an unfamiliar script runs diagonally beneath the feather's tip, with the words set in a clean, slightly rounded hand. The image is taken close up in natural light, with the feather as the main subject and a partly visible tattoo at the lower left edge.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Peacock feather Feather Lettering Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clerk of Vellmoor insists the letter must reach the high tower before the bells ring for noon, and that no one in the kingdom can read it but the queen. You take it anyway. It is rolled inside a peacock's flight feather, the quill end sealed with wax the colour of a bruised plum, and when you hold it up to the lamp the great eye at its centre seems to open a little wider.

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The road to the tower runs through Halde, where the river is so slow it has forgotten which way it was going. You stop at a ferryman's hut to rest your boots. He glances at the feather, then at you, and says the words on the scroll are older than the river's name. He asks whether you have looked closely at the eye. You have not. You do now, and the ring of blue and green is deeper than any dye you have seen, like a window with a second window standing behind it.

At the tower, the queen cannot read it either. She turns the feather in her fingers, holds it to the sun, and laughs, a short sound that startles the pigeons from the sills. "It was never written for me," she says. "It was written for whoever carried it here." She pours you a cup of wine and tells you the letter is an invitation to go back the way you came, and to read it only on the road.

You walk down through Halde with the feather in your palm. By the ferry the letters have shifted into a new arrangement, and you find yourself reading your own name in a hand you almost recognise, though you are certain no one has ever written it that way before.