Close-up of a solid black feather tattoo with fine hatched detail running up the inside of a forearm, with small ink dots near the wrist.

Black feather on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black feather is tattooed along the forearm, angled from the wrist towards the elbow, with a pale central shaft and fine hatched lines forming the barbs. Small black ink dots sit beside the lower end near the wrist. The image is in black and grey against a dark background, with the forearm filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Forearm Feather Quill

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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 closer, the rain's come in under the awning again, and I'll not raise my voice over it. Every Thursday the stalls at Gunner's Yard went soggy by noon, and the letter-man set up anyway, under a tarpaulin that smelt of wet onions. Old Ezra Marrow had a trestle, a tin of ink and a box of quills he cut himself from whatever flight feathers the butcher's boy brought him. People paid a penny a line to have their hard words put down on proper paper.

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One grey morning a girl came through the crowd with a folded note held against her coat, and she would not say who it was for. She only said her mother had gone over the water and the letters had stopped. Ezra asked what she wanted written. She said nothing, not at first. Then she said he should write that she was still waiting, and he took her hand instead of the penny and set it down in the careful copperplate he kept for funerals.

Now here is the part they tell wrong in the taverns. The quill slipped as he signed his name, and a splash of black jumped across the page and onto the back of his own wrist, three small dots like a sparrow's tracks in mud. He laughed and said the feather had more opinions than he did. The girl folded her letter and walked off into the drizzle without looking back.

Ezra kept that quill on the trestle until his fingers got too stiff to hold it. The dots never washed out, and on wet days he'd roll up his sleeve and show the ones who asked where the ink had gone, and tell them it had gone where it was needed.