Drawing of a tattoo design with the word Free in black cursive script beside a feather shaded in rainbow colours, shown on a plain grey background.

Rainbow feather and script Free design

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

The design pairs the word Free in flowing black cursive script with a feather drawn in rainbow bands running from red through orange, yellow and green to blue and purple. The feather has soft, fine strokes suggesting its barbs, and its quill extends toward the lettering. The plain light grey background keeps the focus on the design, which is shown as a drawing rather than on skin.

Lettering Feather Rainbow Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cage door had hung open since Tuesday, and nobody on the farm had the heart to shut it. Dad said the frost would get into the hinge. Ruth said nothing, because she knew the hinge was not the reason. Pim, the lorikeet Grandad had bought off a sailor on the Boston docks forty years ago, had not been seen since the thaw came and went, and the fens lay under a hard white sheet that showed every fox track for a mile.

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On Thursday she walked the top field to the drain with the dog, her breath hanging in front of her, and found the feather snagged in the wire of the gate. It was longer than her hand, banded like a paint chart: red at the root, then orange, yellow, a green that looked wet, blue, and a deep purple at the tip. Grandad used to say Pim was the only untidy thing on the place that kept itself neat. She held the feather up against the grey sky, and the colours seemed to glow from somewhere inside it.

She took it home and laid it in the biscuit tin on the windowsill, beside the seed packets and a brass key nobody could place. Her father found her there at dusk, staring at the empty perch. He did not tell her to come in. He stood beside her a while, then went out to the porch and lifted the cage from its hook, carried it to the woodpile, and left it there with the door still open, as if it had simply been waiting for someone to make the decision.

That night Ruth breathed on the kitchen window and wrote a single word in the mist with her finger, the letters looping like the quill of the feather. By morning the frost had taken the word into the glass, and the feather lay on the sill catching the first light, the one thing on the farm that had not yet decided where to go.