Black and grey realism tattoo of two crossed feathers with a stippled quill tip on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed feathers on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two feathers crossing diagonally, with a pointed quill nib at the lower end. The feathers are rendered with smooth shading and fine barbs, and the nib has stippled dot texture. The design is in black and grey on a pale arm against white bedding, with the tattoo filling the centre of the frame.

Realism Dotwork Upper arm Feather Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The two quills had been left crossed on the hall table of Seacombe House since Tuesday, and Mrs Pardoe would not have them moved. Ada Lind, who kept the accounts in the back parlour, said they looked like a pair of scissors that had given up. The lodgers were not allowed to take the ink from the hall, so the nibs sat there, dry, catching the light from the fanlight every afternoon.

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Mr Rennick had come to Seacombe in March to finish a book about tides, and Mr Vaughan had arrived in April to finish nothing at all. They shared the one writing desk under the stairs because the rest of the house was full of wet boots and gramophone records. By May they were leaving notes for each other under the teapot in the same careful copperplate, each answer shorter than the last, until the Sunday the notes stopped and the quills appeared on the hall table.

Ada found a letter on the mat the morning after the storm. It was unsigned, written with a nib so fine the ink had feathered at the ends of the strokes, and it said only that the tide had turned at four and she should look at the sea before anything else. She carried it down to the shingle in her good coat. Both men were already there, a yard apart on the groyne, neither speaking.

By the time she reached them the wind had lifted a single grey barb from the stones and turned it over twice, and the two men watched it go out over the water without either of them trying to catch it.