Painterly red and blue feather tattoo with sketchy linework and ink splatters across the upper arm, photographed against a brick wall.

Red and blue feather on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large feather fills the upper arm, with a red central plume and blue feather strands fanning out towards the elbow. The linework is loose and sketchy, with soft wash-like shading and a few scattered dark ink specks. Red and blue ink dominate against pale skin, and the arm is raised against a brick wall.

Upper arm Feather Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had rung the bell at Saint Ivo's for thirty winters, and in all that time nothing had ever flown into the tower on purpose. So when the abbot sent him up the ladder on a grey Tuesday in March, he expected a jackdaw or a rook with a stolen crust, not the bird hanging from the bell rope by one foot, beating at the knot.

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It was not a bird he knew. Its body was no bigger than a thrush, but its plumes spread from the shoulders in a red fan, and blue strands ran off the tips like ink dropped into water. The rope had caught it in a loop. Anselm sat on the cold ledge with his knife and talked to it the way he talked to the mule, until the bird stopped fighting and let him work the cord loose. It sat on his knee a moment, looked down at the valley, and was over the wall before he could stand.

It had left a feather caught in his sleeve. He kept it in his psalter for years, between the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, and whenever the bell rang flat the old man opened the book to see whether the blue had faded. It never did. When he was dying, the novice Tomas, a shepherd's boy who could not yet read his Latin, asked what the feather was for.

Anselm told him the truth, which was that he did not know. He said only that the bird had trusted a stranger with its foot, and the bell had rung true for thirty years after. Tomas put the feather back between the psalms and climbed the tower at dawn to ring the bell, and the valley woke to the same clear note it had always known.