Small red feather tattoo with a dark outline and shaded quill, sitting on the left side of the ribs.

Red feather on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A single feather is tattooed on the side of the ribs, angled diagonally with the quill pointing down. The feather is filled with shades of red, with darker tones along the central shaft and a fine dark outline defining its edge. The plain skin and dark background leave the tattoo as the clear focus of the frame.

Ribs Feather Quill

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had gone stiff in the cold, so I held the pot against my palm until it loosened, the way Hanne taught me on the ferry the winter the river froze. Beyond the sorting hall window, gulls walked the drowned car park as if they had paid for the tide. I had forty-one letters to weigh and one red quill left in the tin.

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The quill came from a kite that blundered into the lighthouse lamp in my first year as a runner. Nobody in Saltmere had seen a red wing since the rewilding failed, so Oda kept the flight feathers wrapped in oilcloth and handed them out only for the outbound post that mattered. Cutting one felt like theft. Writing with one felt like being watched by something older than the town.

The last letter was addressed to a lamp keeper on Skerry Point. I knew his handwriting from twelve years of replies, the looped tails on his g's, the way he pressed so hard the paper dimpled. This envelope was thinner, and it smelled of tar and wet wool. The postmark was smudged, but the date inside, written in his careful hand, was the day after the storm that took the light. Someone had written back to him anyway.

I dipped the quill, wrote the address in my own cramped script, and sent the bag out on the morning tide. Then I took the feather from the tin, slid it back into its oilcloth with the nib pointing down, the way it hangs from a bird that has finished flying, and wrote Oda a note asking her to keep the next one for the living.