Feather dissolving into flying birds

Black and grey · Flash

A shaded feather sweeps diagonally from the lower right toward the upper left, its quill and barbs drawn with fine hatched linework and grey shading. From the feather's upper edge, a loose flock of small folded paper-like birds, some with pointed wings, scatters upward across the white background. The design is entirely black and grey, with no colour ink and no skin visible.

Feather Bird Flock Flight

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

Dad never went anywhere without a square of paper in his coat pocket, and by the time the hedges were cut that August he had folded more birds than the greenhouse could hold. He kept them on the potting bench, weighted down with terracotta pots, all facing the same way as if waiting for a signal. He told me once that you could fold a bird out of a letter, if you didn't mind losing the words.

Keep reading

The feather turned up in the rhubarb bed in September, long and grey-black with its quill still whole. I carried it to him in both hands like a found egg. He turned it over, ran his thumb down the barbs against the grain, and said the bird it came from must have been in a hurry. Then he took a sheet of rice paper from the drawer and started folding, and the feather lay beside him in the light while his fingers worked crease by crease.

When the frost came he stopped going out to the greenhouse, so I did the watering. One afternoon I found the potting bench bare except for a single dark bird that had come unfolded at one wing, and beside it the feather, its barbs lifting one by one in the draught from the door, as if something had set them loose. I stood there with the watering can dripping on my boots until the light went.

Last week I strung wire along the fence and pinned up the birds I could salvage, a dozen or so, all pointing toward the old pear tree. The feather lives on my desk now, trimmed at the quill. Every so often a sheet blows off the table and I find myself folding it before I've decided to, and by the time the bird is finished I'm already looking for somewhere to let it go.