Black and grey dotwork feather tattoo on the side of a man's neck, sitting just behind the ear.

Black feather tattoo on the side of the neck

Dotwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A large feather is tattooed on the side of the neck, with a central quill and several curved vanes drawn in bold black outline. The barbs and shading are built up from fine stippled dots, giving the feather a soft grey texture against the lighter skin. The image is a close side view that crops out most of the face, showing only the ear, jaw and neck.

Dotwork Neck 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

Get under the awning, the lot of you, before the rain takes the ink off my sign. Yes, you with the wet coat. Sit. This is about Mrs Hannah Coyle, who sold quills from a barrow at the back of the fish market, and who never once in thirty years let a feather go for less than it was worth.

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Rooks came down on the sheds every dusk, black as burnt paper, and she gathered the primaries they dropped in the moult. Stiff, long, the vanes stippled grey where the damp got into them. A boy came one wet Tuesday, Tom Redding, owing her a shilling from the last one, and offered her a whole bird's wing instead. She turned it over under the lamp and said, you didn't pull this from a living thing, and he said the rooks had been shot on the Downs.

She didn't take the wing. She took his shilling, cut him a quill from the best of the moult, and told him to write his mother a letter tonight, the true one, the one he kept meaning to. He laughed. Next morning the barrow was gone and the rain had stopped, and a feather lay in the gutter by the herring boxes, stripped of every barb but the last.

So mind what you pick up off the cobbles. Somebody always wrote something with it first.