Black and grey feather tattoo that dissolves into dots, with the word love in flowing script below, on the inner wrist.

Feather and love script on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a wrist with a black feather tattoo that fades into scattered dots at its tip, with the word love written in flowing script beneath it. The feather is shaded with soft grey tones and the lettering has fine, looping flourishes. A second, paler tattoo of a similar feather is faintly visible on the other arm behind, with both hands held together against a dark background.

Lettering Realism Forearm Feather Love Script Flourish Dot Hand

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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 quill came off the roof rack on the third day of the thaw, wrapped in a stocking, and I knew before I unrolled it that the nib had split. Father always said a feather keeps its opinions to itself until it is asked to carry ink. Mine had been asked a great deal.

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I wrote to Tom Ashdown from Braunston lock that winter, six letters in a row, each one shorter than the last because paper had to come out of the coal money. The final one I wrote on the back of a seed packet. I put love at the bottom in the loops Mrs Pardoe taught us at Sunday school, the L leaning back as if it was trying not to fall in, and then I drew the swirls beneath it that she called flourishes, because a word that important deserved room to breathe.

Tom never answered. The post came along the towpath with a man who had a limp and no memory for faces. Years later a boy off a working boat brought me a bundle tied with string, and inside was my own feather, the one I had pulled from the goose at Christmas and kept in my bonnet box. Tom had kept it too. He had shaded the quill grey with a wet thumb and pressed it onto a sheet so the ink broke into flecks, as though the feather were lifting off the page and scattering over the cut. I still have that sheet. The flecks are fainter now, and so is the word, but it still sits under the feather, patient as a lock waiting for the water to rise.