Small feather tattoo on a forearm

That winter the geese came down onto Harrow Mere three weeks early, and old Tom Pellow swore they were the last of his father's flock, come back to see whether the place had been looked after. Nobody believed him. He went out each morning with a bucket of barley and a broken spade, breaking the skin of the water so the birds could drink, and every morning he found one quill lying on the frost by the reeds, grey as a rain sky and barred at the edge like a sleeve of smoke.

He kept them in a biscuit tin. Seven feathers by the thaw. On the last morning of February the tin was empty and the mere was open black water, and a girl from the cottages at Fenny Lane was standing where the reeds gave way, holding out the eighth. She had walked three miles in her Sunday boots to return it. She said it had blown against her door in the night and she thought it ought to go back to the water.

He never did say what he told her. The farm folk say he gave her the tin, and that she carried that one feather to the city and kept it close for the rest of her days, and that when the geese come down early in the cold, someone in the valley always takes the long way round to the mere.