Coloured pencil design of three shaded feathers hanging from a cord with turquoise and red beads, drawn on cream paper.

Three feathers with turquoise and red beads

Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows three feathers hanging from a knotted black cord, with fine black quill lines and soft brown and cream shading along each feather. Round turquoise beads and small red beads are strung along the cord, and a teal wash sits behind the feathers. The design is centred on a plain cream paper background.

Feather Bead Cord Knot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gull came in off the mudflats with a wing that would not fold, and Anwen Pryce had her thumb under its keel before it finished complaining. She read the ring number aloud for the notebook balanced on her knee. Callum, the boy holding the net, said nothing, because he was eleven and had learned that silence was the correct response to most things on the Crouch marsh before breakfast.

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The bird was ringed and let go, a grey streak over the samphire. Afterwards Anwen found three feathers snagged in the mesh, two long primaries and a covert, pale at the tips and rust-brown near the quill. She pressed them flat in her coat pocket between a bus timetable and a Polo mint and forgot them until the afternoon, when she dug out a length of waxed cord from the kit bag and tied the knot her grandmother had used on fishing tackle.

Two blue beads from the Colchester market went on first, then the red ones from her sister's old necklace, spaced like stops on a tram line. Callum watched with his hands in his pockets. "Are they for the bird?" "They're for you, if you can tell me which feather broke." He pointed without hesitating at the one with the bent shaft. She laughed and said that was the right answer for a field man and the wrong answer for a present.

She hung the cord from the nail by his bedroom door, where the feathers turned in the draught from the window. Through the glass the tide was coming back across the flats, and the beads knocked softly together every time the wind found the gap under the sill.