Neo-trad style tattoo of a quill pen with a blue feather and flying birds on the forearm, with a script lettering band at the wrist.

Quill pen and birds on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey and blue quill pen with a feather plume rises up the forearm, with a small drop of ink falling from the nib. Three to four small black birds fly away from the feather towards the top of the frame. The feather is shaded with grey and teal blue, and the pen nib and shaft are rendered in grey with bold outlines, while a partly visible script band sits at the bottom edge against a leopard print background.

Neo-trad Forearm Quill Feather Bird Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes had put the letter off since the first hard frost, when the geese went over the top field in ragged lines and did not come back to the water meadow. Her father's pen sat in its tin on the dresser with the nib gone brown. She soaked it in a cup of warm water until the ink loosened, wiped it on the back of an old seed catalogue, and sat at the kitchen table before the lamp could be lit.

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The feather she had pulled from the grey hen that morning lay beside the inkpot, its tip faintly teal where the marker dye from the ewes had rubbed off on it. She dipped the pen, wrote Dear Tom, and stopped. Four months since the flood took the lower barn and he caught the early coach to Leeds without a word for anyone. A bead of ink gathered on the nib and fell onto the paper beside his name. She left it. It spread into a small dark star, and she decided that was honest enough.

Outside, the last of the starlings lifted from the hedge and scattered into the white sky, so many small black marks that she lost count before they were gone. She wrote about the ewes lambing early, the pump that froze twice, the price of meal at Harrow market. She did not write that she missed him. She had found the sentence did better when it was left for him to guess.

At first light she walked the letter to the crossroads box with the envelope buttoned inside her coat. A wing feather had snagged on the gate latch, its quill end stained blue. She pushed it into the envelope with the letter. The postman would think it a mistake. She hoped Tom would not.