Close-up of a small black and grey fine line feather tattoo on the side of a person's ribs, with a black top being lifted above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small feather tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather is drawn diagonally across the side of the ribcage, with a fine central shaft and delicate barbs. The feather is shaded in soft grey tones with some darker areas near the base. The warm, dim lighting and close crop focus attention on the tattoo against bare skin.

Fine line Ribs Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gamekeeper's daughter at Harrowmere Keep kept a jay's feather in her apron pocket, and every morning she pulled it out and smoothed the barbs with her thumb before she lit the kitchen fire. The keep had been a ruin since the great wind of her grandmother's girlhood, when the north tower lost its roof and the ravens moved in to stay. Nobody went up the stairs any more except to count the rooks.

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One grey spring the steward's boy came running down from the battlements shouting that a man was climbing the old wall with a rope of knotted cloth. The gamekeeper's daughter did not go to look. She sat on the hearthstone with the feather across her knee and waited, because she knew the wall well enough to know what a rope of cloth would be worth against it, and what a man would be worth at the bottom of it.

He came in at dusk, thinner than the rope and carrying nothing. He said he had been sent to find the feather's owner, and she laughed and told him the jay had been dead for a year. He looked at the feather for a long while, then at the grey light through the broken window, and said that a thing kept warm against the ribs is never quite cold, and that he had walked a long way to be told so by somebody who had no reason to lie.

She gave him bread and a place by the fire, and in the morning she walked him to the gate. The feather stayed in her pocket. She had never once in her life let it go, and she did not begin that day.