Black and grey realism style tattoo of a feather with small birds flying off it and the script words Where there's a will there's a way, on the ankle and foot.

Feather, birds and script quote on an ankle

Realism · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A large feather is shown in shaded black and grey linework, with its tip dissolving into a flock of small birds rising over the ankle. A cursive script line along the foot reads Where there's a will there's a way. The shading gives the feather soft tonal depth, and the composition wraps from the ankle down across the top of the foot.

Realism Lettering Ankle Feather Bird Script Quote

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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

Right, sit down, the lot of you, before the sausage rolls go cold. You'll not remember me. I was the caretaker with the keys to the prefab, the man who found Gary Pledger asleep in the kiln room every Thursday for a whole term. Tonight I'm going to tell you about Sandra Ogden and the feather.

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Sandra was a year below you, a girl who couldn't sit still through a register. Her house on Stanley Road had more budgies in it than people, all shrieking behind a net curtain. In the spring of 1981 she came to my shed with a grey feather she'd picked off the playing field and asked if a feather that had been run over by a mower could still fly. I said I wouldn't know, I was a caretaker, not a bird. She said that was no answer. She was right.

She kept that feather in a Quality Street tin until the council sent her to her gran's in Hartlepool. Years later a man in a leather jacket turned up at my allotment, bought a packet of runner bean seed and said he'd been hunting for the girl who taught him to count starlings from the top of the bike sheds. He never found her, and neither did I. But he said he'd carried that lesson into the Navy, and onto a hospital ward, and through every sorry form a man has to fill in.

So here's what I'd tell her if she was stood where you are. A feather is just a lot of small hooks holding on to each other. Where there's a will, the hooks hold. Where there isn't, the wind does as it likes. Somebody pour me a half, I've gone dry.