Black and grey shaded feather tattoo on the side of a person's ribs, with a hand resting on their hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded feather tattoo on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather is drawn diagonally across the side of the torso, with its quill angled towards the lower left. The barbs are rendered in dark black ink with soft grey shading that gives the feather depth and a sense of light. The background shows a striped bikini, a white plastic chair and a wooden trellis, and the photograph is taken in bright daylight.

Ribs Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At three in the morning Ward 7 hummed the way it always did, a low note from the fridges and the drip stands, and Maeve Kerrigan found the feather under the sluice room sink. It lay on the lino with its quill angled towards the door, as though someone had set it down on purpose and then thought better of it. She picked it up by the base. It was longer than her hand, black at the centre and shot through with a grey that went silver when she tilted it under the strip light.

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Bed four belonged to Mr Pollard, who had been waiting since Tuesday for a scan he did not believe in. He was awake, as she had known he would be. He asked what she had found, and when she showed him he went quiet, then said his wife had kept jackdaws off the washing line for forty years with a broom and a great deal of swearing. He held the feather up to the window, where the car park lights were smeared across the glass, and turned it until the barbs caught the light and separated, each one its own small blade.

By six the sky over the multistorey had gone the colour of dishwater, and the vent above the nurses' station was pushing warm air down onto the desk. Mr Pollard was asleep, one hand open on the blanket. The feather sat on his locker where Maeve had left it, lifting a little each time the vent breathed out.

At handover she wrote in the notes, under bed four, that the patient had slept well and had been given his tea. She did not write about the feather. When she left the ward the light was full and white, and on the roof of the car park a pair of jackdaws were arguing over something they had found in the gutter.