Small black fine line tattoo of a feather breaking up into flying birds on the inner upper arm, shown against a pale background.

Feather dissolving into birds on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A dark feather sits low on the inner arm and its upper edge breaks apart into a loose flock of small flying birds rising towards the elbow. The lines are fine and the feather is filled with solid black ink and soft grey shading, with the birds drawn as simple silhouettes. The tattoo is centred on the arm against a pale, softly lit background with a light patterned fabric at the left edge.

Fine line Upper arm Feather Bird Flock Flying bird

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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

Sit down on the wall, love, mind the wasps, they're after the windfalls the same as we are. No, don't look at the sky yet. Wait till I've finished.

Keep reading

There was an orchard above Hollin Lane where the Bramleys grew so heavy the boughs touched the grass, and in the last week of August a girl called Nell Parry went up the old ladder to pick the high ones. She found a feather caught in the crook of a branch. It was long and black as a rook's wing in the shade, and it smelled of rain. She put it in her pinafore pocket and told nobody, because her grandmother always said a feather that falls in late summer belongs to the swallows and must be handed back before they go south.

Nell didn't hand it back. She kept it under her pillow for three nights. On the fourth morning the quill was warm, the vane had gone soft at the top, and when she lifted it to the window the edges began to lift off like smoke. Small birds came away from it, one, then ten, then a whole loose flock, and they went up past the window frame and out over the orchard as if they had been waiting in the barb all along.

They settled on the telegraph wire above the lane, forty of them, shifting like pencil marks. Nell stood at the gate with an empty palm and the quill stub gone grey between her fingers. Her grandmother came out with the basket, looked up, and said nothing at all. Then the swallows lifted together, the wire swung behind them, and the apples went on dropping into the long grass.