Black blackwork feather tattoo with small birds flying from its tip, on the lower back of a woman in a white bikini sitting on a sunny beach.

Feather and birds on lower back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind sits on sand with her long reddish-brown hair blown across her shoulder. A black feather tattoo on her lower back, to the side of the spine, has small birds scattering from its upper edge. The solid black ink contrasts with warm, sunlit skin and golden sand, and the photo is composed with the tattoo in the lower third.

Blackwork Back Feather Bird Beach Bikini

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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, the bench is dry enough. You want the feather story or the one about the drowned bell? The feather, good. My grandmother told it differently, and she had it from a man who sold kippers out of Whitby, so take it as you find it.

Keep reading

There was a fisherman called Tobias Hale who went out past the breakwater every morning in a boat painted the colour of marmalade. One January he came back with his nets empty and his hands shaking, and in the bottom of the boat lay one black feather as long as a man's forearm. Nobody in the harbour had seen a bird that size. He would not say where it came from. He only kept saying the birds had gone up when he touched it.

He tucked it inside his oilskin and carried it home, and that night he sat at the kitchen table turning it over while the kettle went cold. Out past the window the gulls were quarrelling over the fish heads. When he finally held the quill up to the lamp, a dozen small birds broke away from its upper edge, one at a time, like sparks from a bonfire, and went straight out through the open door into the dark.

He never caught the last of them. But every spring after, when the boats came in, somebody on the quay found a single small feather on the step, and a bird seen flying low over the water, and they'd know Tobias had gone out again. That's the whole of it. Pass me that cup, would you? My hands aren't what they were.