Small black and grey tattoo of two feathers on the back of a person's neck, with a hand raised to the head and a white flower ring.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two feathers on the back of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph taken from behind shows two small feather tattoos side by side on the back of the neck, angled slightly apart with their tips pointing downwards. The feathers are rendered in dark grey and black with soft shading along the quills and barbs. The background is a warm, dim interior, with a hand resting on the head at the top of the frame.

Neck Feather Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The woman at window four had a biscuit tin on the counter, and inside it, wrapped in tissue, were two grey feathers no longer than my thumb. I should have bounced the tin straight back to her, because the form said animal products go in the bin unless they're declared, and she hadn't declared anything. But her passport was in order, and she was already apologising for the delay before I'd asked a question.

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They were from a pigeon called Nine, she said, who had flown the same route for eleven years between her uncle's yard above the harbour and a café in Lille where he used to sell him sugar for crumbs. Nine had come down on the yard wall in March and not got up again. Her uncle wanted something of him kept, and she wanted it done properly, so she was carrying the feathers across to bury beside him. I asked why two. She said one for each side, and that the left had been bent under the body when they found him, so the tip still pointed down the way a bird's wing sits when it's folded and finished.

I held them up to the strip light. The quills were pale at the root and dark at the tip, and the barbs had a softness to them, as though someone had shaded them with a pencil and then breathed on the paper. I thought about the pigeon I released from my grandad's shed when I was nine, how it went straight up over the rooftops and never came back to the loft, and how I'd cried for a week and then stopped thinking about it.

I wrote 'two feathers, wildlife, no duty' on the slip and stamped it. She took the tin and thanked me twice. Before she went, I saw her set the feathers back in the tissue with the tips pointing down, exactly as she'd described them, and I let her walk out into the car park with the wind coming off the water.