Black and grey realism tattoo of a feather on the side of a woman's ribs, with a grey top pulled to one side.

Shaded feather on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather is tattooed diagonally on the side of the ribcage, with its quill running up towards the armpit. The feather is rendered in soft grey shading with fine dark lines along the barbs and a lighter central shaft. The background shows a grey top, long hair and a plain wall, with the photo cropped above the chin and below the chest.

Realism Ribs Feather Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grey feather was lying on the down platform at Thornbeck when Ada Marr unlocked the ticket office at six, a single wood pigeon's flight feather pinned flat beneath a damp handbill for the Whitby excursion. She picked it up by the quill, the way her father had taught her to handle anything that might still be warm. The barbs were soft and dove-coloured, darker along the edges where the shading thickened, and the shaft ran pale down the middle like a thread of light.

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Feathers had turned up on that platform all winter. Ada had stopped counting them in January and started keeping them in a biscuit tin under the counter, seven of them now, each one found near the bench where Tom Gill used to wait for the milk train before he went off to sea. Nobody else seemed to notice them. The porter swept them into the coal bin with the cinders, and the stationmaster said pigeons moult in every season if you care to look for it.

On Friday the signalman told her the line would close for good at the end of the month, and the platform would be left to the weeds and the birds. Ada took the tin home that night, sat up with the lamp, and wrote a letter to Tom at a Hull address she had never once posted. When it was finished she pressed the newest feather inside the folds of the paper and walked it down to the box at the end of the platform, where the rails ran away north into a mist she could not see past.