Black and grey line drawing design of a feather that breaks apart into a flock of flying birds, shown on a plain white background with no body placement visible.

Feather dissolving into a flock of birds

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A feather drawn in fine outline with delicate barb lines rises from the bottom of the image and fades into a scatter of small solid bird silhouettes. The birds vary in size and angle, flying upward and to the left across the top of the composition. The design uses only black ink and grey tones on a white background.

Fine line Feather Bird Flock Flight Silhouette

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 wind has been wrong for nine days, and Haskell is still swearing at the foresail when you find the feather on the rail, grey-tipped and wet with spray. Nobody aboard has moulted in weeks. You hold it up against the sky and it looks like a quill someone forgot to dip.

Keep reading

By the second watch the birds have come. Small dark shapes, a dozen, then thirty, tumbling down from the topgallant as if they had been waiting out there all along. They settle on the yardarm, shake themselves, and lift again, heading north-west into a sky the colour of pewter. Haskell says they are storm petrels and that the glass will fall before morning. You say nothing, because the feather has begun to tremble between your fingers, the way a thing does when it wants to go.

You pin it inside the logbook at the page for the Tuesday of the calm, meaning to keep it dry. When you open the book at dawn the feather is gone, and a fine line of grey dust sits in the gutter where the spine bends. Out past the bowsprit the flock is a loose scatter of specks, bending together and apart, and for a moment you could swear the last of them is carrying something pale in its beak.

Haskell comes up with the tea and finds you grinning at the empty margin. "Land by Thursday," he says. You tell him the birds already know the way.