Black and white photo of two women, one with a fine line shaded feather tattoo on her upper chest and the other with a matching feather on her upper back, with a small bee tattoo on the first woman's

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two matching feather tattoos on chest and back

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

Two women stand close together, cropped at the mouth and nose, showing a shaded feather tattoo on the upper chest of the woman on the left and a matching feather on the upper back of the woman on the right. The feathers have fine, delicate linework with soft grey shading along the quill and barbs. A small bee tattoo is visible on the left woman's arm, and the image is a high contrast monochrome photograph against a dark background.

Fine line Chest Back Feather Bee Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had kept count of the days by the bee in the jar on the galley shelf. The cook's boy had caught it in a sugar tin off Madeira and fed it crumbs of honey biscuit, until the surgeon ordered it thrown over the side and the boy, weeping quietly, obeyed. Ada watched it go from the rail with her hair whipping across her face. 'It'll find land,' she said, as if she'd arranged it.

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The feathers had been Ada's idea. In a tattooist's back room in Portsmouth, the week before they sailed, the artist had worked two grey quills into their skin with a needle so fine that Nell had flinched only at the start. Ada wanted them matching, so that whichever of them reached a strange port first could be recognised by the other from across a quay. Their mother would have hated it. Nell had decided that was reason enough.

Off the Horn the sea went the colour of slate and stayed that way for nine days. Ada stopped sleeping. Nell found her one night at the taffrail with a gull's feather pinched between two fingers, turning it so the lantern light slid along the barbs. 'It came down on the deck,' Ada said. 'Right at my feet. As if it had somewhere to be.' She let the wind take it, and Nell did not stop her.

Valparaíso rose out of the haze in a jumble of painted houses, and the first person Nell saw on the quay was a boy with a sugar tin under his arm and a hole punched in the lid. Ada laughed until she had to sit on a bollard. Nell lifted her collar to check that the feather still lay where it always had, and found Ada doing the same, both of them grinning at the bright, wrong colour of the sky.