Teal and black feather tattoo with tribal swirl detailing on the upper back.

Teal feather with tribal swirls on the back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A long, curved feather runs diagonally across the skin, with its quill outlined in black and its barbs shaded in teal and blue. Black tribal-style swirls sit alongside the feather's inner edge and continue down to a curled tip at the base. The image is a close, slightly angled photograph with soft lighting and a blurred background.

Back Feather Swirl Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lamp, it has been smoking since Tuesday, and keep your hands where I can see them. Good. Now, the Marigold Tern, eleven weeks out of Port Sallow with the water casks gone green and a captain who counted rats for sport. Nobody aboard could find the coast any more. The sun rose in the wrong corner of the sky each morning, and the charts, God rest them, had stopped agreeing with each other.

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Then the cook's boy came up from the hold shouting that a feather had dropped onto the bread. It was long as my forearm and blue, not the flat blue of a gull but a blue that turned green at the edges where the light caught it, like a lagoon seen from high up. The quill was black as tar. Along its inner edge ran a row of black curls, each one folding in on itself like a wave deciding whether to break. Nobody had seen a bird like that. The captain wanted it thrown over. The boy would not let go.

Here is the part they tell wrong in the taverns. That feather lay on the binnacle for three days, and each morning its tip had curled a little further round, the way a compass needle settles. The curl at the base pointed to where the swell came from, so they followed the curl. Eighteen days of following it, through a squall that took the mizzen and a fog that hummed like a choir, until the cliffs of Harrow Bay stood up grey out of the water and the boy was the only one not weeping.

When they came ashore, the boy dropped the feather off the end of the jetty, and it did not sink. It went out on the tide, turning, and I would swear on my mother's teeth it was still curling the wrong way when it reached the horizon. Now pass me that cup. My throat is as dry as the Tern's last biscuit.