Black and grey tattoo on the upper back of a feather that breaks into a flock of birds flying upwards, in fine line and dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather breaking into a flock of birds on the back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A feather sits at the lower right of the design and its quill tapers down towards the lower edge of the frame, with its barbs dissolving into several birds in flight that rise towards the upper left. The birds range from detailed wings with stippled shading near the feather to small dark silhouettes further away. The tattoo is in black ink with grey tones on pale skin, and the photograph is black and white.

Fine line Dotwork Back Feather Bird Flock Flight

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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

Hush now and mind the fire, for the snow has shut the pass and we are locked in until the thaw, which means you will hear every one of my nights before you go to bed. Fill my cup, Tomas. This one is about a feather that did not want to stay a feather.

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Ninety winters back, when the Three Cranes still had a sign you could read from the road, there lived a girl called Ilse Ferrow who kept the stove alight while her father drank himself quiet. Her brother Anton went over the pass in early December to fetch the doctor from Caldervale. He took a grey wool coat, a lantern and the heel of a loaf. On the third morning a single feather lay on the sill of the upper window, long as a hand and dark at the tip. Ilse hung it inside his empty coat on the peg, because it seemed like something a man would want to find when he came home.

The next morning there were three feathers, then a dozen, then a drift of them along the sill, and each one was lighter than the last. On the ninth night the flock came down out of the cloud, hundreds of grey birds settling on the roof ridge and the bare elms, and not one of them made a sound. Ilse stood in the doorway with the lamp and saw that they were not coming to her. They were waiting for the feather on the peg to be carried out to them.

At dawn the snow broke. Anton came up the road behind the doctor's mule, grinning through frost in his beard, and the coat on the peg was empty. Above the pass the flock wheeled once and rose towards the upper left of the sky, one bird peeling away and drifting down through the cold until it landed in Ilse's open palm. The quill was warm. I have kept it ever since, and it is the one thing in this inn I would not sell.