Small black and grey fine line tattoo of a feather with a trail of tiny birds, on the side of an ankle.

Feather and birds on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a feather sits on the side of an ankle, with a trail of tiny birds flying away from its upper edge. The feather is drawn with fine, delicate linework and soft grey shading along its barbs. The black and grey palette and the light skin tone against a pale background keep the focus on the small, centred design.

Fine line Ankle Feather Bird Flying bird

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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 feather had come in the post, which was the first odd thing, because nobody in Tregarrow ever sent anything without a stamp. Ada Penhallow turned the brown paper parcel over on the counter and found no sender, only the words for the one who waits in pencil, and a single grey wing feather laid flat between two sheets of card.

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She had been waiting for her son's letter since March. Tom had gone to Canada on the boat from Plymouth with a suitcase and a promise, and every morning she sorted the bundle for Chapel Row with steady hands while her eyes went to the envelopes with foreign stamps. Nothing came. The feather lay on the scales beside the brass weights, its barbs combed fine and shaded at the edges the grey of rain on slate.

By four o'clock the telegraph wire outside the window was crowded with starlings, and Dennis, the postmaster's boy, leaned in the doorway to say they had been there since dinner, restless as a tide. Ada held the feather up to the light. Then the flock lifted all at once, a loose cloud pouring off the wire, and a handful of birds peeled away over the chimneys and were gone.

That night she wrote to Tom at the kitchen table, pinned the feather inside the folded page, and sealed it before she could change her mind. In the morning she took it to the box herself. The letter would take five weeks to cross the Atlantic, but she had a feeling the feather would arrive first, carried on whatever wind had brought it to her.