Black and grey realism tattoo of a quill feather beside an ink bottle on the upper back, near the nape of the neck.

Quill feather and ink bottle on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey tattoo of a quill feather with its tip resting near a small ink bottle, set on the upper back below the nape of the neck. The feather uses soft, layered shading and fine strokes along its vanes, while the bottle is outlined with light highlights on the glass. The photograph is black and white and shows the wearer from behind with the head turned away and hair falling across the neck.

Realism Back Quill Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell had taught her sons to read by the lamp at the back of the post office, but it was the Greaves boy who came to her table that March with a sheet of foolscap folded in four and a face like wet cardboard. He could not spell his mother's name, he said, and he could not spell the word for missing, and would she write it for him so it looked like someone else had sweated over it.

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She dipped the nib and wrote what he said. Dear Mam, the ground is cold and the officers are kind enough. The ink ran thin on the downstrokes; she had bought the cheap bottle from the stationer on Cross Street because the good one had cracked in the frost. Every few lines she stopped to let him find the next words, and he sat with his cap in both hands, watching the feather of the pen as if it might fly off with the news.

When he reached the part about his brother, he could not go on. Ada waited. The clock over the door ticked through three full minutes before he said, "Put that he's keeping his boots dry," and she did, and the lie sat on the page as neatly as anything true.

He took the letter away folded in his breast pocket. A fortnight later the stationer's boy brought back the cracked bottle, empty, with a card: the sender had died. Ada kept the bottle on the sill and filled it with fresh ink each Monday, and wrote, in her own hand, a line to nobody, then blotted it before the light could read it.