Two black-and-grey feathers tattooed on skin in a soft, realistic style, one larger and upright, the other smaller and angled to the lower left.

Two shaded feathers on skin

Realism · Black and grey · Photo

Two feathers are tattooed on skin, one larger and upright and one smaller and angled towards the lower left. The quills are drawn with dark, defined linework, while the barbs are built up with soft, feathered shading that fades into the skin. The image is in black and grey, with the feathers set against a plain, warm-toned background of skin.

Realism Feather Plume Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls had been dying on the gallery rail all week, which my father said was the wind's doing and not the sea's. I swept them off each morning with the stiff brush, and each morning I kept what feathers I could, because my mother had kept every feather she ever found, pressed flat inside the pages of the almanac.

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The big one came off a gannet the night the Marguerite went onto the Skerry. It was as long as my forearm and dark along the spine, and when I set it in the tin it stood up straight, as if it expected someone to come up the stairs. The smaller one I found on the bottom step, bent at the tip and pointing towards the shore, as though it had been trying to leave before the rest of it.

Father climbed the tower every hour that night. I counted his boots through the iron rungs, the lamp checked, the wick trimmed, the brass turning over his head. Near four the beam swung out over the water and I heard him say the boat's name once, like a question, and then the fog closed over the sound and took it.

In spring the men from Cullen brought up a piece of the mast wrapped in sailcloth. They said nothing about the hands. That evening I took the smaller feather out of the almanac and laid it on the sill beside the other, and the wind came through the open glass and lifted them both, then let them settle, the same way.