Drawing of two grey feathers with teal and red bands, with a flock of birds flying between and above them, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Two feathers with birds in flight

Mixed · Flash

A black and grey drawing of two feathers set at an angle, with fine hatched linework on the barbs and a central shaft. Each feather has a teal and red band across its middle, and a scatter of small black birds trails upward from between them and drifts off the top and bottom of the sheet. The design sits on a plain white background with no body part shown.

Feather Bird Flock Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The morning Eddie leaves Carrow Bridge you are the one holding the umbrella over the platform, because he has already given his to the baker's boy and says rain is only for people with somewhere dry to go. The 7.12 to the coast is late. In your coat pocket are two feathers, both pulled from the gutter under the church belfry, where the two of you used to climb the iron ladder while your mother was at the mill.

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Last night at the kitchen table you painted their middles, teal from the tin Mr Pryor sells for fence gates and red nail varnish taken from your mother's Sunday drawer. The stripes ran a little at the edges because your hand would not keep still. Eddie said they looked like a flag somebody had sat on. You told him it was a map. He said maps were for people who meant to come back.

When the whistle finally sounds, a flock of starlings lifts off the signal box roof and spills across the sky like thrown ash. Eddie takes one feather from your palm, presses it into his breast pocket, and laughs at the birds as if they had been arranged for him. Then the carriage door bangs shut and the window drops with a squeal, and he is leaning out, pointing up, shouting something the engine swallows.

You stay under the umbrella until the last carriage is a smudge against the moors. Then you walk home the long way, past the church, where the jackdaws are back on the ledge quarrelling over the best stone. The second feather is still in your glove. Its red band has rubbed off on your thumb, and you do not wash it off.