Black and grey botanical tattoo on the inner forearm showing a feather with roses, small flowers and leaves, with a word written along the feather.

Feather and roses on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A feather runs diagonally across the inner arm, with a word written along its shaft in fine script. Roses, small five-petalled flowers, leaves and a few buds cluster at the left end and spread along the lower edge of the feather. The work uses soft grey shading and fine linework on pale skin, with a plain, slightly faded background.

Botanical Lettering Forearm Feather Rose Flower Leaves Bud Script

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 ferry stopped coming to Carrick Holm in the winter the bell fell into the sea, so Old Morag began sending her news by feather. She plucked a gull's wing feather each morning, pressed a sprig of sea pink into the quill's groove, and tied it to the fence post where the boatmen could see it. Nobody on the mainland had asked her to. She simply had too much to say to the lighthouse keeper's widow, and the rocks between their two houses were no place for shouting.

Keep reading

The feathers went out with the tide. Some came back, bent and salt-stained, with answers written small along the shaft in pencil. A feather that reached the far shore was tucked into a cairn; a feather that reached nobody was left to the wind. By spring the cairns stood as tall as children, and the islanders had a custom that a letter should never go without a wild rose beside it, because the roses grew on the lee side of the dyke and cost nothing but a scratch.

Then in April a feather came back with no pencil on it at all. There was only a pressed rose, five-petalled and brown at the edges, and a single leaf stuck with resin. Morag sat on the step with it for an hour. The keeper's widow had been dead since Candlemas, and the boatman who would have carried the answer had gone to the mainland for good.

Morag took the feather to the cliff, wrote her last question along its shaft, and let the wind have it. The answer, she decided, was already on the island, pressed flat in a cairn somewhere. She went home and put the kettle on for two.