Two small black and grey feather tattoos sit on the upper back near the shoulder blade, one above the other, in a fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two feathers on a shoulder blade

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two feathers are tattooed on the upper back, close to the shoulder blade, with one angled above the other. The feathers are drawn with fine, delicate linework and soft grey shading that suggests the barbs and plumes. The skin is pale and the background is dark, so the black and grey ink stands out clearly against the composition.

Fine line Realism Back Feather Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls had gone inland before the storm, and Morag's father said that meant nothing good was coming up the firth. He was right about the weather but wrong about the boat. The Catriona came in at dusk with her sail torn to ribbons and only three men aboard, and the fourth, a boy called Ewan Breck, was not among them.

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His mother walked the shore until the tide turned, calling his name over the water. On the third morning a fisherman's wife found a feather caught in the bladder wrack at the high-water mark, long and grey and still soft at the root. Then another, a little way along, as if someone had laid it down on purpose for her to find.

Morag took the two feathers home and set them on the windowsill to dry. Her mother would not touch them. Her father said feathers blow about, that was all, and went out to mend the nets. But every morning the feathers had moved a finger's width nearer the sea, and on the morning of the fourth day the window was open and there was nothing on the sill but salt.

The next spring a heron stood in the shallows below the harbour wall, grey as the sea and very still. When the boats came in it lifted, slow and heavy, and flew out over the water with its neck folded, and Morag, watching from the wall, could have sworn she saw a boy's hand trailing from the bird's breast, pale and open, letting go of the last of the light.