Black and grey realism tattoo of a single feather on the side of the ribs, with the tip pointing towards the front of the body.

Shaded feather tattoo on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather is tattooed horizontally along the side of the ribcage, with its tip pointing towards the front of the body. The barbs and central shaft are rendered with fine linework and soft grey shading that gives the feather depth. The image is in black ink only, and the subject is framed in a close side view against a dark background.

Realism Ribs Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind off the Humber found the gap in the big top on Tuesday and took Mr Pell's hat clean over the dodgems. I fetched it from the mud behind the chip van. Caught in the band was a single feather as long as my forearm, black at the tip and silver-grey where the light caught the shaft. Mr Pell swore it came from the rook that used to sit on the generator, though that rook had flown off to Hull in March and never come back.

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I should have given it back. Instead I slid it into the ticket booth between the cash tin and the roll of pink tickets, and every evening it sat there like a bookmark while the wheel went round and the bulbs flickered in the rain. Folk asked to buy it. A boy offered me a week of candyfloss. I said it wasn't for sale, which surprised me, because I hadn't known until then that anything on the fair belonged to me.

On the last night before we moved on to Selby, the generator died and the whole fair went dark in one long sigh. I sat in the booth with a torch and the feather across my knees. The wind came in under the canvas and lifted it, just slightly, the way a page lifts when someone has left a window open. Its tip pointed out through the flap towards the north road, and I thought of the rook, and of Mr Pell's hat, and how nothing that blows across a field ever really asks permission.

In the morning I packed the tin, the tickets and the feather, and laid it on the dashboard of the lorry with its point to the windscreen. We drove north with the window cracked. Every mile or so it lifted and settled again, as if it were checking the road was still there.