Black and grey shaded feather tattoo on the side of the torso, above the ribs, with a pale central quill.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded feather tattoo on the side ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather runs diagonally up the side of the torso, with its tip pointing towards the top of the frame. The barbs are rendered in dense black and grey shading with fine hatched strokes, and a pale central shaft gives it dimension. The plain skin background is softly lit, and the feather sits alone in the centre of the composition.

Realism Ribs Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls had gone quiet over Morrow Cove the week the tide brought the ledger ashore. Mrs Agnes Penhale found it wedged between two lobster pots, its boards swollen and green, and carried it up the shingle without opening it, because her husband had always said that nothing good came from a thing the sea was finished with.

Keep reading

She read it at the kitchen table of the boarding house that evening, with the lamp turned low so the guests upstairs would not see her face. The entries were in a hand she half knew, a looping, careful script that listed names and dates and a single word beside each: kept, or released. The last entry was from the autumn her brother Tom had gone out on the Mary Ellen and not come back. Beside his name, in the same neat ink, someone had written released, and under it a single feather, drawn with such patience that she could almost feel the barbs under her thumb.

She went to the window. The wind was pulling a loose feather across the harbour wall, turning it over and over, lifting it and dropping it, as if it had somewhere to be and had forgotten where. She opened the sash and let the cold in. The feather rode the draught up past the gutter, past the chimney, higher than any gull she had ever seen fly, until the dark took it.

At breakfast the guests asked where the ledger had gone. Agnes buttered her toast and said the tide had taken it back, which was true enough, and went to fetch the eggs.