Coloured pencil drawing of three feathers hanging from a cord with turquoise and red beads, a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three feathers with turquoise beads

Colour · Flash

The drawing shows three feathers hanging from a dark cord, with turquoise and red beads strung along it. The feathers are shaded with fine pencil hatching in cream, brown and dark red, with a soft teal wash behind them. The design sits centrally on a plain beige background.

Feather Bead Cord

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the feathers hanging from the nail beside the back door on the morning the thaw finally breaks, three of them tied to a length of dark cord with a knot your grandmother used for bale twine. Nobody in the house claims them. Your brother says the cat brought them in, but the cat has never once come back with anything so neat.

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The yard is grey and crusted with frost, the milk churns stacked upside down along the wall like a row of patient ghosts. You lift the feathers and turn them to the window. Rust-brown at the tips, cream fading to ash at the quill, and threaded between them are small turquoise beads, each the colour of a pond under a clear sky, which is not a colour anyone on this farm has seen since August. Red beads sit among them like sparks nobody put out.

You spend the afternoon in the lambing shed with the paraffin heater ticking, trying to work out who would string beads on a cord and hang it where a farmer's wife would notice. Old Mrs Tully from the next parish had a box of such things, you remember, bought from a travelling man who promised a charm for her husband's chest. Her husband died anyway. The box went to a jumble sale in March, and you never saw her wear anything blue again.

By dusk you have tied the cord to the hook above the feed bin. When the wind comes round off the moor the three feathers lift and settle together, the beads knocking softly against each other, and you leave them where they are until the first lamb of the year is standing on its own legs in the straw.