Black fine line tattoo of a feather breaking up into small flying birds, placed on a woman's upper chest near the collarbone and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather dissolving into birds on the collarbone

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black tattoo shows a feather at its base that fades into a trail of small birds flying up and away towards the shoulder. The linework is light and sketchy, with soft shading on the feather and tiny, separate marks for the birds. The image is a close crop of skin, with a knitted white jumper and dark hair at the edges, and the tattoo sits in the centre of the frame.

Fine line Chest Feather Bird Flying bird Collarbone

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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

You climb the ladder to the loft at half eleven, the last bulb swinging on its flex, and the cold comes up through the slates like something that has been waiting for you. Your father's birds shuffle on their perches, a dozen of them, grey and restless, and you count them the way he taught you, touching each one's back with a finger before you let yourself sit down.

Keep reading

The letter from the developer is folded in your coat. Eleven flats, it says, where the pigeon loft now stands over Attercliffe, and a date in March. You take it out, read the first line again under the bulb, then put it back. Past the chimney pots the city hums orange, a lorry grinding its gears on the ring road, and somewhere below a dog barks at nothing in particular.

At four, you open the trap. Nobody has told the birds about the letter. They go up in a loose wheel, wings clapping, and before the last one leaves a feather drifts down and settles on your knee, dark blue-grey, its vane fraying at the tip. You hold it up to the streetlight and the tip breaks into threads, then into specks, and the specks lift off above the rooftops, a trail of small birds turning east over the Don until the dawn takes them.

You sit with the empty loft for a long time. Then you go down the ladder, leave the letter on the kitchen table under the sugar bowl, and ring the number on the back of it, because the birds always come home, and you want to be the one waiting when they do.