Two shaded feather tattoos in brown, gold and purple tones with dark outlines, sitting on the outer ankle of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two feathers on an ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

Two feathers are tattooed on the outer ankle, angled diagonally with the quills pointing towards the top of the foot. Each feather has dark outlines and detailed shading in brown, tan and gold, with some purple tones in the lower one. The plain light background keeps the focus on the skin and the design.

Ankle Feather Ankle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, love, and mind the drip stand, it has opinions. You won't have heard of Mrs Aldous on Ward Nine, because she died before you came to us, but she kept two feathers in a jam jar on her locker. The night she went, the sister found them tucked under her pillow, and nobody could say who had put them there.

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They were a rook's and a jay's, she told my mother, though I never once saw her pick them up. Her husband had carried the post up the hill above Calder Cross for thirty years, and every autumn the birds came down to the lane to fight over the crusts he dropped. He used to say a feather was just a letter the bird forgot to post. She laughed at that every time, the way you laugh at a joke you've heard a thousand times and still want to hear again.

When his heart gave out on that hill, the sorting office sent his bag round to her, and under the last parcel lay the same two feathers, gone brown at the tips and gold where the sun had reached them. Nobody had ever seen him carry them. She kept them flat between the pages of the hymn book for eleven years, and when the paper began to crack she moved them to the jam jar, quills pointing up, the way he used to hold his pen when he wrote her a card.

So when the corridor goes quiet and you hear something tapping at the window, don't go and look. It's only a letter that never got sent, and somebody on this ward has always been waiting for it. Right, that's the bell. Go on, I'll mind the desk.