Purple shaded feather tattoo with black bird silhouettes rising from its tip and fine script lettering beside it, on the side of the ribs.

Purple feather with birds and script on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A shaded purple feather with fine hatched linework runs diagonally across the side of the torso, with a flock of black bird silhouettes rising from its upper end. Curved black script reading Birds of a feather, set me free follows the feather's edge. The purple ink is set against black outlines and bird silhouettes, with soft skin tone around the design.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Feather Bird Script Quote Flock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mattie, the jackdaws have taken the north tower again, so forgive the smudge on this page. Your brother came up the hill on Tuesday with an empty hamper and a grin that meant he had been at the bottom of a bottle. I sent him home with a bolt of wool dyed the colour of bilberries, the only purple this valley ever gives us, and a firm word that he is not to sell it to the Lindqvist woman who pays in promises.

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I have been dyeing the feathers too, since the market women keep asking for hat trims that will not fade. Old Hobb at the gate says birds of a feather flock together, and I think he means the gulls that stole my last batch of cloth. Every evening the rooks come down off the curtain wall and circle the broken chapel before they settle, and I stand in the yard with the vat steaming behind me and count them until the light goes.

The last feather I dyed came from a rook caught in the portcullis chain. I could not bring myself to boil it with the rest, so I soaked it a whole night in the bilberry liquor, then hung it in the arrow slit where the wind could get at it. At dawn the whole roof rose at once, dozens of them, black against the grey, and the feather lifted off its hook and went up with them. I watched it until it was only one more speck over the moor.

Come up before the frost and bring the good alum. Tell Father the next feather is not for sale, and tell him the birds were never ours to keep. Yours, Nell.