Black and grey fine line tattoo of a quill feather, stacked books and an inkwell with a small flower, placed on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Quill, books and inkwell on a lower leg

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A quill feather arcs over a stack of closed books and an inkwell with a small flower beside it, with a few small stars and scrolling flourishes around the base. The design is drawn in thin black outlines with light shading on the pages and feather. It is shown in black ink only, framed against a patch of pale skin on the lower leg.

Fine line Calf Quill Feather Book Flower Star Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow reached the second milestone the morning the boy came up from Hollin with his cap in both hands, and I had already cut four quills for nobody. Winter is a slow season for a scrivener at the top of the pass. The carters who used to pay me a penny a page to tell their mothers they were still alive have gone down to the valley, and I sit in the back room of the Ram's Head with my ledgers and my inkwell, the one with the cracked lip and a blue flower pressed into the glaze.

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His name was Tam Ferrier, and he had a letter in a tin box wrapped in oilcloth. It was addressed to Mrs Agathe Corrie, Lower Scree, care of this inn. The hand was mine. I knew it before I knew why, the long loops on the capitals, the way I always crossed my sevens. I had written it in October for a woman who could no longer hold a pen, the autumn the bridge at Cauld Burn washed away. I was to post it with the next mail. The next mail never came, and the letter went under the ledgers with the inkwell sitting on top of it like a paperweight.

"She said you'd know the hand," Tam said. "She said you'd tell me what it says, because she never could read past the first line." So I broke the seal with my thumb and read him what I had written for her, which was mostly the weather and the name of her goat. Then I took a fresh sheet, dipped the nib, and wrote the reply he needed, from what he remembered of her voice. The ink in the well had gone thick with cold and I had to work it with the nib, but it came.

When the road opened in April, Tam went down with both letters inside his coat. The inkwell was still on the sill. I rinsed the flower from its glaze and left it there, with a little water in it, where the light comes through in the mornings.