Colour tattoo of a blue, teal and magenta feather ending in a quill nib with gold detailing, on the upper arm and shoulder of a woman in a white vest top.

Colourful feather quill on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large feather runs diagonally from the shoulder down the upper arm, with its quill ending in a decorative gold-toned collar and a small nib. The feather is shaded with smooth gradients in blue, teal, purple and magenta, with darker outlines defining the barbs. The background is plain black, and the image is a side view that crops out the subject's head.

Neo-trad Upper arm Shoulder Feather Quill Ornament

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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, sit down, and mind the cat, she's had her eye on your tea since you came in. No, the story isn't long, but it has a feather in it, and feathers take their time coming down. Right. There was a clerk at the customs house on the far side of the sound, a thin man called Ruairidh Gunn, who wrote every manifest by hand because the ink was the only thing on that island that never went damp. He had one pen, a goose quill his grandmother gave him, with a brass collar worn gold where his thumb went.

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One winter the gulls came down so thick on the quay that nobody could open the warehouse doors, and a grey ship came in with no name painted on her, only a bird. The captain wanted her cargo logged before the tide turned. Ruairidh dipped the quill and the nib wouldn't take the ink. It drew blue, then teal, then a flush of magenta across the page, the colours of the sea the morning after a storm. He was frightened, I'll tell you that, but he wrote what the ink wrote, and the cargo turned out to be every letter the island's drowned men had meant to send home.

Here's the turn. When he read them out on the quay, the widows came, one after another, and each one took a sheet and walked home lighter. Ruairidh kept the last page for himself. It was blank except for a single barb, feathered out at the edge as if it was still falling. He put it in his coat and went to sea himself the next spring, and nobody on the island has seen that quill since.

So if you find a feather on the shore with a gold collar on it, don't pick it up. Leave it for whoever's still owed a letter.