Black and grey feather tattoo on a forearm, with a flock of small birds rising from its tip towards the elbow.

Feather and birds on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A long grey feather runs down the forearm from near the elbow towards the wrist, with soft shading along its barbs. A flock of small bird silhouettes trails up from the top of the feather towards the elbow, some with faint reddening around them. The photo is taken indoors under flash, with a plain skin background and a blurred person in a blue top at the left edge.

Forearm Feather Bird Flock

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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

The rooks had been gone from Harrow Edge since the summer the lime kiln burned, so when a flock came back over Stannage wood that October, my father stopped the cart in the middle of the lane and would not let me climb down. I was nine. I remember the cold rising through the boards and the wheel spokes ticking as they cooled.

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Next morning I went up alone, past the hazels where the path turns soft, and found a long grey flight feather lying across a flat stone as if someone had left a letter there. It was clean, though the ground was wet. When I lifted it, the bracken shivered and a trail of birds rose from the trees, climbing the way the quill climbs to its tip, small ragged shapes breaking off one at a time towards the sky above the village.

Mrs Fenwick at the shop said a feather like that was a debt. You picked it up and you owed the bird its flight. I laughed at her. I pressed the feather between the pages of the almanac and forgot it until the spring my father left for the drovers' road and did not write. The rooks did not return that year either.

I still have the feather. Each October I climb to the stone and set it down, and I watch the flock lift off the trees and draw a dark line up the sky. I count them the way he used to, and I always lose the count in the same place, where one bird breaks from the rest and turns back towards the wood.