Shaded feather on the side ribs
Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo
A single feather with a curved quill is tattooed diagonally on the side of the ribcage, with the tip pointing down towards the waist. The barbs are shaded in dark grey and black, with fine lines suggesting individual strands. The photograph is black and white, with a loose white vest top and dark underwear visible around the tattoo.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Dear Ruth, Mr Ashdown shut up his shop on Tuesday, so I went down to Cragg Lane with the last of my savings and bought the whole of his drawer of quills before his nephew could sell them to the rag man. You will think me soft. I have wrapped one in tissue and put it in this envelope, so mind you do not crush it under the stamp.
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He cut them the way his father did, at a slant, with a little knife he kept in a tobacco tin, and he talked the whole time about the difference between a goose that has walked the stubble fields and one that has only ever stood about on a pond. The good ones, he said, go grey at the tips where the weather has got into them. He showed me how the barbs lie over one another, dark at the root and paler toward the edge, so that the whole thing looks like it is still deciding which way to drift.
I asked him what he would do now he had no shop. He put the last quill on the counter, turned it so the light caught the shaded side, and said a feather never falls straight down. It only comes away when it has finished the work of holding the air. Then he laughed and charged me sixpence more than I had counted out, and I paid it gladly.
Write soon. Tell me if the post still runs to the coast, and whether the pen I sent you last spring is still scratching the paper at night.
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