Shaded grey feather tattoo wrapped in a fine line ribbon, with a curled swirl above and a small script mark below, on a person's upper back.

Feather and ribbon on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A realistically shaded feather runs vertically down the upper back, with a thin black ribbon spiralling around its shaft. A curled musical-style swirl sits above the feather, and a small black script mark with a star appears near the bottom. The work is in black and grey, with soft smudged shading and a faint pinkish blur to the lower right of the feather.

Realism Fine line Back Feather Ribbon Swirl Script Star

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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 pit at Harrowgate Bank had taken eleven men before Lent, and by March the women of Lowbeck Row had stopped lighting candles in the chapel window. Mary Tennant did not stop. Each night she sat at the scrubbed table with her father's old goose quill, bound round with black silk so the nib would not split, and wrote to Thomas Ayre, who had gone down with his lamp on the Tuesday and not come up.

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She wrote the way her mother had taught her, with a curl on each capital like the scroll of a fiddle, and at the foot of every page she drew a small star, because Thomas had once said a man could steer by one even underground. The letters went down the shaft in the morning cage, folded inside the lamp-boy's cap, and the old men swore on their pipes that the cage bell rang differently when a letter rode in it.

On the ninth night a single feather came up the shaft on the cold draught, grey-brown and flecked with coal dust, and it settled on the chapel step as gently as if someone had set it down. Its vane was stained a rose colour near the tip, where the seam had burned in the dark. Mary knew it for Thomas's. She wound it into the silk on her quill, three times round, and wrote one line on the back of the last letter: come up now, the lamp is lit.