Pencil sketch of six loose feathers scattered across a pale page, drawn with soft shading and fine hatched strokes, shown as a possible tattoo design.

Scattered feather sketches in pencil

Black and grey · Flash

Six loose feathers are drawn in pencil on a pale sheet, each one curled or tilted at a different angle. The linework is loose and sketchy, with feather barbs suggested by short, directional strokes and shading built up on one side of each quill. The drawing is in greyscale and the feathers fill the page with plenty of open space between them.

Feather Sketch Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The feathers had been coming away from the costume since Tuesday, one at a time, as if the company were shedding its last good coat. Mabel Croft stood in the empty big top with a pin between her teeth and watched the afternoon light catch a grey quill as it turned over and over in the draught from the open flap. It settled by the ring fence, barbs fanning, then lifted again when the generator coughed outside.

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The show was down to eleven people. Frank Dunmore had sold the elephant trailer to a farm in Norfolk in March and kept the wagon with the painted moon, where he slept with his boots on. The aerialist's headdress had been sewn by Mabel's mother forty years earlier, and every night the plumes gave up a few more, so that the crowd in the back rows saw less of it and the front rows saw more of the bare wire frame underneath.

"Leave them, Mabel," Frank said from the entrance, not unkindly. "They're only feathers."

"They're the bit people look at from the back," she said, and she kept gathering them, pressing each one flat between the pages of a biscuit tin that had once held shortbread for the ringmaster's birthdays. By the time the rigging was checked, the tin was full and the sawdust was scattered with the strays she had missed.

That evening, when the lights dimmed and the aerialist climbed toward the rafters, a single feather came loose from the frame and drifted down through the spotlight. Mabel watched it from the wings with the tin shut in her lap. It turned once, twice, and came to rest on the sawdust just inside the ring, where nobody would step on it until morning.