Hand-coloured flash drawing of a red and orange feather with a black kanji character beside it, shown on a cream background, with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red feather with kanji character

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

The drawing shows a single feather with a curled upper section and a tapering lower quill, rendered in bold black outlines. The feather is shaded from deep red through orange to yellow, with lighter highlights along the central shaft. A black kanji character sits to the right of the feather against a plain cream background.

Neo-trad Feather Kanji Character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ines,

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The officer at the border wanted to know what was in the tin, and I told him tea, which was only half a lie. Under the lid, wrapped in your grandfather's blue handkerchief, is the feather from the kite that came down on our roof the week of the floods. You called it dead weight in the car. I called it the only bird I ever saw stop in the air to look at a person.

He turned it over under the strip light, slowly, the way Haruto used to test a brush before he trusted it. The red went to orange where the light touched the quill, and for a moment nobody in the queue said anything. Then he handed it back, said it was too pretty to be contraband, and waved the bus on.

I have been thinking about the character Haruto painted on the lid, the one that means bird. He said it was really just a bird with its wings drawn up, and that the trick was to leave the top stroke a little open so the thing could still take off. I used to think that was nonsense. Sitting in that car park with the engine running, I understood he had meant it as a kind of instruction.

Keep the feather in the front window where the morning sun comes through. By August it will have faded to the colour of marmalade, and you will know it is home at last, the same as I did when you rang.

Love, Nana