Black and grey tattoo design of a large feather with silhouetted birds in flight rising from its tip against a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birds rising from a feather

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a drawn feather, shaded in greys, with its quill at the bottom left and its vane fraying into many small dark bird silhouettes. The birds scatter upwards and to the right, with larger birds near the top and smaller ones lower down. The design is in black ink and grey tones on a plain white background, with no skin or body part visible.

Feather Bird Flight Silhouette

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, before the sherry goes warm. Nobody at this table remembers Miss Pryor's nature table, but I do, because I was the one sent out into the rain to find it. Ask me what for, and I'll tell you it was a feather, a long grey one with a quill like a bent pin, lying on the wet tarmac behind the bike sheds where the Hartley girls smoked.

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Miss Pryor said a feather was a promise that something had flown, and she wanted it in a jam jar by Friday. So I carried it in my fist all the way up the corridor, and by the time I reached the classroom it had started to fray at the edges, the way old paper does when you read it too often. Then it was no longer a feather. It was a flock of sparrows lifting off the sill, then rooks over the allotments, then a single gull crossing the playing fields in the wrong direction.

Nobody believed me, which was fair, because I'd been eating paste since Monday. Yet when the bell went that afternoon, the window was black with birds, and Miss Pryor stood with her hand over her mouth and said, very quietly, "Well, go on then, all of you."

So I did. I've been going on ever since.