Pencil drawing of two feathers

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of two curling feathers, one overlapping the other, with a central quill line running down the lower feather. The feathers are rendered with fine directional strokes and soft shading that create highlights and depth along the barbs. The image is greyscale and shows the design on plain white paper with no body part visible.

Realism Feather Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad kept racing pigeons in a loft behind the colliery row, and every spring he swore the birds knew the difference between the cage cart and the pit wheel. He never let me handle the cocks. I was allowed to sweep the loft floor and keep whatever came loose, which is how I ended up with two feathers in my biscuit tin, one dark and curling, the other pale underneath where the light caught it.

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The winter of the long shift, Dad came home from the cage with his lamp still clipped to his cap and nothing to say. Two men from the lower seam had not come up, and the rescue crew worked three days on the stone. Mam put the kettle on and kept putting it on, as if the water might make the hours go faster. I took the feathers out of the tin and laid them on the oilcloth, one over the other, the way they had lain on the loft floor, and Dad looked at them for a long time.

"Quill's still sound," he said at last. "That's the thing. A bird that's been through a fall loses the quill first."

Next morning he carried the old cock up to the top field and let it go. It circled the headframe twice, then came back low over the allotments and dropped into the loft as though it had only been to the shops. We found the grey hen on the Tuesday, sitting on the pit-head wall with her feathers puffed against the wind, waiting for the cage to rise.