Black and white photo of a fine line feather tattoo behind a woman's ear, with her hair in a ponytail.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small feather tattoo behind the ear

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of the side and back of a woman's head, showing a small feather tattoo on the skin behind her ear. The feather has delicate, fine linework with a dark central quill and light, sparse barbs, and no shading or colour. The soft background shows a window with white blinds, and the ponytail and ear are in sharp focus.

Fine line Other Feather Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas,

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Night shift on Ward Six is quiet enough now that I can hear the blinds ticking in the wind off the car park. Mr Adeyemi in bed four asked me last night whether the window was open, and I told him no, it was only the building breathing. He laughed so hard he woke the man in five. That's the sort of thing we do at three in the morning here, and I think you'd like it.

Something odd has been happening. Every night for a week there has been a single grey feather on the sill by the far window, lying across the slats and always pointing towards the door. Porter Dev swears he hoovered it up on Monday. Agnes in the office says it's a pigeon's and that pigeons shed all the time. I mostly believe her. But the feather is never the same length twice, and it's never damp from the rain the way a feather off the roof would be.

Last night I picked it up before anyone could sweep it away and held it near the lamp. The quill was dark as a pencil line, the barbs so thin and far apart that you could read the light through them. I thought of the girl in bed nine, who had been told she could go home on Friday and had cried into her pillow because she didn't know who would feed her cat. I put the feather in my pocket and went to check her obs.

When I came back at five it was gone from my pocket and lying on the sill again, pointing at the door. I've decided to leave it there. Maybe someone on the next shift needs a reason to look up.

Love, Ruth