Black ink tattoo of a feather that breaks up into flying birds, running from the upper back over the shoulder towards the side of the neck, shown in two photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather dissolving into birds on shoulder and neck

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large feather whose lower quill sits on the upper back and shoulder, with its shaft fading into a flock of small black birds rising towards the neck. The linework is solid and the feather is shaded with grey tones, giving it depth, while the birds are rendered in crisp black silhouettes. The diptych shows the same tattoo from two angles, one of the back and one of the side of the neck, against a plain skin background.

Shoulder Back Neck Feather Bird Flock Flight Shoulder Neck

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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

Mind the gate, it sticks, and keep off the rhubarb, that's Ada's, and she'll have your ankles for it. Sit on the bench, the one with the good back. Now. You want the feather first, or the birds? Everybody wants the birds, but the birds are only what the feather did when it got tired of being still.

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Back when the mill still turned, there was a goose called Mags who laid one grey feather a year and not a single one more. The miller's girl, Nell, kept them all in a biscuit tin under her bed. The winter the river froze hard enough to walk on, the tin went missing, and so did the largest feather, the one with a dark stripe down its spine like a lane through a field. Nell went out after it in her stockings and found it lying on the ice, trembling, the way a thing does when it wants to go somewhere but has forgotten the way.

She picked it up and it lifted out of her fingers. Not far, just to the top of the orchard wall, where it hung in the air and shook itself loose. Then it came apart. Every barb let go at once, and each one became a small black bird, and the birds went up into the dusk in a long ragged line. The quill, the last of it, stayed in her hand, pale and empty. For a while the flock wheeled round and round over the mill, and Nell stood under them with her mouth open and her breath smoking.

That was sixty years ago. The mill's a ruin now and the orchard's been sold twice, but starlings still come down to the chimney stack every evening before dark, and if you listen, under all that chatter, you can hear someone counting them. Nell always said they'd come back to the feather when the count was right. Mind the gate on your way out. It sticks.