Black ink tattoo of a feather on a person's upper back, with its quill edge breaking into a flock of flying birds that climb towards the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather dissolving into birds on a back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A feather is drawn in fine black hatched linework on the upper back, its lower quill tapering down the spine area. Its feathery edge gradually breaks apart into small birds in flight, which are solid black silhouettes rising towards the top right of the frame. The photograph is taken in warm light on bare skin, with the design filling the centre and right of the composition.

Back Feather Bird Flight Silhouette Flock

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 gulls had been wrong all week, so when the wind backed round to the north-east on Tuesday you put the kettle on and wrote it in the log before you looked out. Forty-one years at Carrick Head and you still did it the same way, the date first, then the weather, then whatever the sea had left on the rocks. This time it was a feather, grey and barred, caught in the lichen below the lamp room door. You picked it up with two fingers and turned it to the light. The vane had torn in one place, neat as a comb, and the torn bit was already loosening into a fan of smaller barbs that wanted to be somewhere else.

Keep reading

Mrs Ardagh from the boarding house came up the path at noon with a basket and a face like a closed door. Her lodger, the young cartographer with the tin trunk, had gone out before dawn with his drawing board and not come back. She wanted to know if you'd seen him. You had not. You had seen, at first light, a scatter of dark birds going out over the water in a loose rank, and then breaking, one by one, into the haze until there was only the feather in your hand and the kettle beginning to sing.

She stayed for tea, which she never did. Between sips she told you the lodger had sketched birds every evening on the back of his maps, always the same shape, always rising. You turned the feather over and wrote in the margin of the log, in your square hand: one feather, found, north-east wind, no ship reported. Then you added a line you had never written before. Something has gone up over the headland and not come down yet.