Black and grey pencil drawing of a feather-like design where two stylised faces with shaded eyes sit within the feathers, with beads at the top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather and face design in grey pencil

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a stylised feather design where two human faces are formed from the feather barbs, one in profile at the centre and one turned to the right. A long quill with round beads hangs above, with wispy strands curling around it. The work uses fine graphite-style pencil linework with soft grey shading across the feathers and faces, on a plain white background.

Feather Face Eye Bead Quill Profile

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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

Master Pell held the goose wing up to the window and frowned at it as though it had insulted his mother. 'Too many faces in this one,' he said. 'Ruth, cut it down to a plain vane before it spoils the lot.'

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Ruth took the feather to the bench and turned it under the lamp. The barbs along the outer vane had bunched into slanting ridges, and where the light caught them two faces looked back at her: one in full profile, its mouth set like a man refusing a second helping of pudding, the other turned to the right with eyes as wet as glass. The quill above them bore two round glass beads, and a pale thread of down curled off it as if the bird had not finished leaving. It had come in a crate from a dead stationer's estate in Shoreditch, with a note that said only, For the girl who writes the letters.

She did not cut it. Instead she sat with the wing in her lap until the lamp guttered, then wrote to the widow in Shoreditch, whose husband had kept feathers in tins for forty years. The letter took three drafts. Each time she dipped the nib, the faces in the vane seemed to lean closer to the page, as people do when someone reads aloud.

On the last sheet she signed her name and sealed the envelope. In the morning Master Pell found the feather tucked in the drawer beside the good ink, the quill trimmed to a neat point, and the profile on the vane turned towards the door, as if it were waiting for the post.