Black and grey realistic feather tattoo on the side of the ribs, angled diagonally with soft shading along the barbs.

Shaded feather on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather is tattooed diagonally along the side of the ribcage, with its quill running down towards the waist. The feather is rendered in fine, layered linework and soft grey shading that shows the barbs and central shaft. The background is a grey top pulled aside and a slatted blind, with the skin tone warm against the dark ink.

Realism Ribs Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the rail, love, and don't stare at the mural on the landing, the paint's got a mind of its own. Right. Fourteenth floor of Ashworth House, and a lad called Dennis Pike who kept pigeons on the roof because the council said he couldn't and his nan said he could. Every morning he climbed up with a bag of maize and came down with his pockets full of grey feathers, because those birds moulted all over the felt as if they were paying rent.

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One January a wind came off the moors and tore the blind clean off the kitchen window of flat nine. Dennis's sister Maureen found a single feather stuck to the sill, long as a hand, dark at the tip and pale where the light came through. She held it up against the sunset over the car park and said the barbs looked combed by someone patient. Dennis said it was a flight feather, the kind that carries a bird the whole way. Maureen said then it ought to go somewhere useful, and she pinned it to the corkboard by the bins.

Years went by. The feather faded to the colour of weak tea, and nobody could say who had moved it from the board to the window ledge, or back again. The council knocked Ashworth down in the spring. On the last morning Maureen walked up to the roof with the feather tucked in her coat, and the pigeons came down onto the parapet all at once, the whole loft, and sat there watching her as if they'd been waiting for an answer.

So that's the tale. No, don't ask me if it's true. The birds went out to the allotments on Carr Road and they're still there, and nobody's ever found the feather. Mind your step on the last flight, it's slick with rain.