Black and grey shaded wing tattoo on the side of the ribs of a person lying on a white fluffy rug.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wing tattoo on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a torso lying on a white fluffy rug, with a dark navy top and pale yellow shorts. A black and grey wing is tattooed on the side of the ribs, with shaded feather detail that sweeps diagonally towards the waist. The tones are muted against the warm skin, and the frame is softly lit with a slightly grainy finish.

Realism Ribs Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the grate, you lot, and mind the draught, for the snow's piled to the sills and this story won't keep. Old Hobb Tennant came down off Gallow Pass the winter the bells froze, with a sack of salt on one shoulder and a wing across the other. Not a whole wing. Just the bone and the long grey feathers, fanned out like a fire screen, and he swore on his mother's grave it had been pulled from a swift that dropped out of a clear sky at his feet.

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The landlady at the Drover's Rest would not let it over her threshold. Hobb sat in the snug with it across his knees and a pint going warm, and when the wind dropped he heard, or thought he heard, a sound like a shutter being drawn slowly closed. He carried it to the cold larder and laid it on the flagstones. By morning every feather had shifted, all of them turned to point at the door, the way a dog points at a rabbit it means to chase.

Hobb did what any sensible carter does with a thing that won't behave. He took it down to the mender at Ashby, who sold wicks and fishing lures, and asked what it was worth. The mender said nothing for a long while, then asked whether Hobb had ever once been lost on the high road. Hobb said no. The mender said that was because the wing had been looking after him, and it would go on doing so only while it was carried, never sold.

So Hobb kept it pressed in oilcloth under his seat for forty years, and when the roads closed he always took the lead, feeling the pull of those feathers through the wood like a compass needle. When they found him in the spring, sitting upright in his cart at the top of the pass, the oilcloth lay open and every feather was flat, all of them pointing down the road to home.