Gold feather with a flock of black, gold and silver bird silhouettes rising from it, on the inner forearm of a person wearing a red checked sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather and birds on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A gold feather with a black central shaft rises up the forearm, with a flock of small bird silhouettes in black, gold and silver lifting away from its tip. The feather has fine detailed barbs and the birds are simple solid shapes. The design appears to be a metallic temporary tattoo, shown against a green Christmas tree with warm lights in the background.

Forearm Feather Bird Flock Metallic Temporary tattoo

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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

You have the oven door open before the shutters have finished rattling up on Kettle Lane, and the heat comes out at you all at once, like something that has been waiting in the dark for company. Mrs Okonedo's tray of bread rolls is due out at six. Her order is pinned to the wall beside the proving cupboard in pencil gone soft from handling. Forty cobs, twelve plaits, one loaf for the vicar with no crust on it, she insists.

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The sky over the car park is still the colour of cold dishwater. Above the bins, a flock of starlings has begun to gather on the telephone wire, shuffling and restless, deciding. You watch them through the back window while the scraper goes round the steel bench. In the drawer under the till there is a goose feather you kept from the last delivery of Christmas geese, the one you use to brush egg wash onto the glossy tops of the plaits. It is stiff at the tip and soft at the root, and it smells faintly of the farm.

When the first grey light comes you lift the cobs out onto the rack, and a single starling drops off the wire, lands on the sill and tilts its head at the glass as if it has been sent to check your work. You flick the brush at it without meaning anything by it, and the whole wire lets go at once, a black rush of wings pouring up past the lamp until the sky takes them.

You stand there with the feather in your hand and the bread cooling in front of you. You do not bother to tell anybody what you saw. The loaves are good, the day has started, and nobody else on Kettle Lane will have seen it.