Black and grey fine line swirl tattoos with shaded feathers on a woman's shoulder and upper chest, with a silver chain visible.

Feather and swirl tattoos on shoulder and chest

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Two tattoos of feathers joined by thin, looping linework, one on the shoulder near the hair and one on the upper chest below the collarbone. The fine outlines are combined with soft grey shading that gives the feathers depth. The image is in black and grey and is cropped close to the skin, with a gold chain crossing the chest tattoo.

Fine line Realism Shoulder Chest Feather Swirl Heart Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls came down on the gallery rail every evening that October, and Mam swore they were counting the lamps. I counted feathers instead. Each morning I swept them off the iron grating before the wind could take them over the cliff, and I kept the best ones in a tobacco tin under my bunk at Skerry Head station.

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Dad had kept the light for thirty-one years and never once wrote down anything he saw. He logged weather, oil and tides in pencil, and nothing else. So when the relief boat brought Tomas Vey out to us in March, I didn't expect a man who could sketch. He carried a sketchbook in his oilskin and a brass pen he dipped in an ink pot he'd brought all the way from Aberdeen.

He drew feathers mostly. Gull, then curlew, then one long grey one from the heron that stood in the shallows below the slipway. He could make a quill look wet. I asked once why he never drew the sea, and he said anyone could smudge a sea, but a feather had to be told where to stop. Between each one he ran a loop of line, so fine I had to hold the page to the lamp to see it, and at every join he put a small heart that looked like a knot.

On the night the boat didn't come back for him, I climbed the stair with the tin under my arm and found his sketchbook open on the lamp room table. The last page held the feathers I'd been saving, pinned flat under his pen, and beneath them a line in his neat hand: keep the light, the rest will find its way. I wound the clockwork and kept the lamp turning until the dawn boat came, with his feathers in my pocket.