Back of a woman with her hair tied up, showing a pair of fine line black outlined wings with teal wash fills across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal wing pair across upper back

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A pair of wings is tattooed symmetrically across the upper back, with thin black outlines drawn over individual feather shapes. The feathers are filled with loose teal and turquoise wash that fades softly at the edges. The subject is framed from behind against a pale painted canvas with red and blue strokes.

Fine line Back Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kingfisher came back to the pond the week after Dad's funeral, and I took it as a kind of rudeness. He had always said the bird was a liar, all blue back and no belly, flashing past like someone who'd forgotten their manners. I was up a stepladder re-pointing the wall when it landed on the lip of the basin and looked straight at me.

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We kept the garden between us for forty years without agreeing on a single bed. He wanted the delphiniums staked in rows, I wanted them to fall over however they liked. The pond was his idea, dug the summer I turned nine and lined with a sheet of rubber he patched three times. Last spring I found a loose feather caught in the reeds, teal at the tip and fading to nothing near the quill, and I pressed it between the pages of his seed catalogue without quite knowing why.

On Sunday I went down with a bucket to drain the silt. The water was clearer than I had seen it in years, and where the liner folded at the bottom there was a curl of tin wire wrapped around a fistful of brown-green stones. I hauled it up. Stamped into the base of a little tin wind chime, the sort he used to hang in the apple tree, were his initials and a date from the year before I was born.

I hung it back on the apple tree, where the kingfisher could perch on it if it liked. Then I left the catalogue open on the kitchen table, the feather marking the page for May, and went out to see whether the bird had come back.