Black and grey realism tattoo of a feather, an ink pot and an ink splatter on the forearm.

Feather and ink pot on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large feather rises diagonally up the forearm, with fine hatched strokes defining its barbs and soft shading along the quill. Below it sits a shaded glass ink pot with a highlighted rim, and an ink splatter with droplets spreads at the base of the arm. The work is entirely in black and grey ink against plain skin, with a blurred background.

Realism Forearm Feather Ink splatter Quill

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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 inkwell went over at half past eleven, which Mr Pardoe later said was the only honest thing I did all week. I had been trying to finish his letter to his daughter in Halifax before the mail coach left at dawn, and my hand, steady through three wills and a disputed boundary, chose that moment to shake. The pot slid off the sill, struck the floorboards and split its glass lip. Black went everywhere, but mostly into the blotter.

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I did not wipe it up. I sat with the goose quill still in my fingers, the one I had cut that afternoon, and watched the stain spread into a shape that looked as though it had been trying to get out of the bottle for years. Mr Pardoe's letters had always been the same: short, correct, never once mentioning the girl's name. I had copied a hundred of them. I knew how to say nothing in four lines.

In the morning I carried the sheet to the coach office folded inside my coat, still tacky at the edges. The clerk asked whether I wanted it weighed. I said no. I told him the letter was finished, which was true, because the ink had said the thing I had been too careful to write. I paid the fare with the last of my wages and walked home along the canal with a smudge on my cuff that would not come out for a week, and I was glad of it.