Black and grey realism feather tattoo with flying birds and Beautiful Disaster script lettering on the side of the ribs.

Feather and birds with lettering on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large shaded feather runs diagonally across the side of the ribs, with fine barb detail and soft grey gradients. A flock of small birds rises from the upper tip of the feather, and script lettering reading Beautiful Disaster sits beneath it in a bold block style. The photograph is taken at an angle with a hand and red fabric visible at the top left and a sliver of denim at the bottom.

Realism Lettering Ribs Feather Bird Flock Lettering Quote

Find an artist for this

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 hall at Skelder Bottom had pine boards that gave under a dancer's heel, and on the night the feather came in through the broken skylight, Tobias Wren was playing a reel too quick for anyone to keep up with. Nobody danced. They leaned along the walls with their cups and watched the feather turn in the lamplight, slow as a leaf on still water, until it settled at the feet of Mary Ashcombe, who had walked up from the valley that morning with a bag she would not set down.

Keep reading

Birds came after it. A flock of small grey things dropped through the same gap and wheeled under the rafters, so close the lamps guttered, and the old men said what they had said about the last ones, that a feather in a dance hall means someone has waited too long for their turn. Tobias stopped with the bow in the air. The birds did not stop. They went round and round the boards like something being stirred.

Mary bent, lifted the feather by its quill, and held it up the way a woman holds a letter she has not yet decided to read. Then she set down the bag, took the first step of a dance nobody had taught her, and Tobias, without being asked, began again, slower this time, so the boards could take the weight.

By morning the skylight had been stopped with a sheet of tin, the birds had gone up to the moor, and the bag stood empty by the door with a pale mark on its strap where the feather had been tucked. Mary was already on the road to the valley, but the boards of the hall still gave, just a little, in the place where she had stood.