Winged golden ball tattoo behind an ear with teal wash shading, shown freshly done on the left and healed on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged golden ball behind the ear

Neck · Colour · Photo

Two side-by-side photos show the same small tattoo behind an ear, fresh on the left with purple outline and blue wash, and healed on the right with dark linework, gold tones and teal shading. The subject is a winged golden ball with feathered wings drawn in fine lines and a soft blue wash behind it. The close crop shows the ear, neck and dark hair, with a small mole visible below the tattoo.

Neck Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ball was never meant to be caught by anyone who wanted it. Everyone in Harrowmere knew that, the same way they knew the north bridge swayed in spring. My uncle Tobin had chased one across the water meadows for nine summers and came home each autumn with mud to his knees and nothing in his fists.

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The gold ball had come out of the old quarry the year the church bells cracked. Its wings were stitched with grey feathers so fine you could read the sky through them, and when it flew it left a blue wash in the air like breath on a cold pane. The Keeper of the Quarry Gate sold tickets to watch the chase and sold more to the men who wanted the crown, a dull pewter thing that nobody ever wore.

I was twelve the autumn I stopped running. My apron was full of dropped stitches from the mending I'd been paid to do, and the ball came down low over the reeds, its wings clicking like a dealer's shuffle, and hung a yard from my face. Tobin shouted at me to grab. I didn't. I held out my open palm the way Gran taught me to offer bread to a wary goat, and I waited.

It landed on my palm weighing nothing at all. The crowd went quiet, then loud, and the Keeper began counting coins out of his apron. I turned my hand to show Tobin, and the ball lifted, looped once over the water, and was gone into the blue dusk. My palm stayed warm all the way home.