Pen and ink drawing of a dark blue feather breaking apart into a flock of small birds, a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Feather dissolving into flying birds

Mixed · Flash

A large feather drawn in dense black pen hatching fills the left side of the page, with its tip curling at the top and its quill at the bottom. Small bird silhouettes break away from its right edge and drift upwards across the cream paper. Blue and purple shading sits within the feather and birds, with the black linework giving it a sketched, textured finish.

Feather Bird Flight 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 moult came early that year, and by the first week of August there were grey-blue feathers in every corner of the loft, drifting across the straw as if someone had been shaking out a pillow. Walter wouldn't let me sweep them. 'Leave them where they fall,' he said. 'They're the only part of her that came home.'

Keep reading

Her was Dove Lass, a blue chequer hen who had gone up from Carlisle in May and never dropped in at the loft. The club clocks showed her cresting the Pennines at four in the afternoon, and then nothing at all.

I found the big one on a Thursday, a long primary the colour of a bruise going green, snagged in the wire of the door. I carried it to the kitchen table and tried to make it lie flat the way Walter had shown me, but the tip kept curling up as though it wanted to be somewhere else.

That evening I climbed the ladder to the roof hatch with a tin of bran and the feather tucked in my apron pocket. Below, the birds were restless, wings snapping against the mesh. Walter had gone to bed early. When I lifted the hatch, the air off the moor smelled of wet stone and coal smoke.

At first light the whole loft went up at once, eleven birds banking over the allotments and breaking apart above the gasworks like ash lifting off a bonfire. Walter came out in his slippers and shaded his eyes. 'There she is,' he said, and I didn't have the heart to tell him that the sky was full of birds and none of them were hers.