Fourteen black and grey ink drawings of feathers, some with bold banded stripes and some with plain pale quills, arranged in rows on a grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sheet of black ink feather studies

Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows fourteen feathers drawn in pen and ink, arranged in loose rows on a plain grey background. Some feathers have bold solid tips and banded stripes, while others are smooth and pale with fine hatched edges. The linework is detailed and the shading is built from hatching and solid black areas, with no colour used.

Feather Stripe Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third winter the moor birds stopped coming down to the mere, Hesketh Dunn climbed the scree above Carrow with a sack and a bone knife, because the queen had put a price on striped feathers and the price was a sack of barley for each one. By dusk he had fourteen. Each had come from a different bird. Some were barred black and white like a hawk's tail, with tips dipped in ink. Others were pale and soft at the edges, as if frost had brushed them.

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He laid them out on the table of his aunt Morwen, who sorted them without speaking, the way she sorted eggs. She pushed the pale ones to the far end of the wood. "Those are wrong," she said. "The queen wants the banded ones. The pale ones belong to the owls, and owls remember who took from them." Hesketh asked what the pale ones were for. "For the kind of flying that needs no witness," said Morwen. He tucked three of them inside his coat anyway.

At the palace the queen counted the banded feathers and found thirteen. She looked at Hesketh for a long time, then reached into his coat and drew out a pale feather as if it were a letter she had been expecting. Her face changed. She asked him what he wanted. He told her he wanted to go home to Carrow, where the owls still nested in the chapel roof.

He went back up the scree the next morning, before the guards were awake. At the top, where the wind comes in off the sea, he opened his coat and let the owls' feathers go, one at a time, until they drifted down over the mere like grey ash from a fire that had not been allowed to burn.