Two hatched black ink feathers standing side by side on a white background, a blackwork-style flash design.

Two black ink feathers

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

Two tall feathers are drawn in bold black ink on a plain white background, one slightly taller and angled differently from the other. The barbs are shown with dense hatching, white highlight gaps and fine curling strokes at the tips and quills. The image is a single-colour design with no body part visible.

Blackwork Feather Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marjorie, the big top came down on Tuesday in a wind that didn't care who was still inside it, and I have spent three days picking sawdust and tent pegs out of my hair. Two of the feathers are yours to keep now, if you still want them. They're the black and white pair from the shoulder frame Mr Oriel built for the rigging act, the ones that made the girl look like she had forgotten how to be a bird and was trying to remember on the way down.

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The show folded in Carlisle with four weeks of wages owed and a ringmaster who took the cash box and a taxi to Glasgow. Nobody wanted to be the one to tell her. She found out from the lorry driver, who had been paid in custard creams, and she went straight up the ladder without her shoes and sat on the top bar until the lamps went out. I climbed after her with a flask of tea gone cold. She said the feathers came from a sea eagle that died in a barn in Northumberland, and that she had always thought it was a sad sort of luck to start with.

In the morning she had gone. The rigging was bare, the frame was propped against the Bedford, and on the stool by the trunk were the two quills, pulled clean from the spine and laid side by side, both pointing the same way. A note under them said only: send these on to whoever is still flying.

So I am sending them. I wrapped them in brown paper, put your address on the front, and wrote Fragile twice because the post office never listens. Stand them up against a window when they arrive, the way she used to, and tell me whether the light comes through the gaps.