Blue line-drawn feather fading into a flock of birds taking flight, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Feather dissolving into flying birds

Fine line · Colour · Flash

A large feather runs diagonally up the left side of the design, drawn with fine hatched linework that shades from deep blue at the base to lighter teal at the top. Small birds break away from the feather's upper edge, with flecks of ink scattered between them. The design sits on a plain white background with no body part visible.

Fine line Feather Bird Flight Ink splatter

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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

The starlings came back to Mrs Pell's laurel every October, and every October my brother Tom stood underneath it with his cap held out like a collection tin, catching whatever the garden let go. He kept the feathers in an old biscuit tin under his bed, sorted by colour, pigeon grey at one end and jackdaw black at the other. I thought it was a baby's game until the summer he turned eleven and started drawing them.

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The garden behind our terrace ran down towards the canal in three steps of cracked paving. The year we moved in, Dad had put a rowan along the back wall, and that was where Tom found the big primary, dark at the quill and silvering towards the tip, lying across the path as if someone had set it down to keep their place. He carried it indoors like a wand. That night he pinned it to the kitchen door and traced round it in biro, then again, until his jotter was full of feathers that would not sit still.

By the second week of September the rowan had gone bare and the swallows were lining up on the telephone wire. Tom sat on the back step with the jotter across his knees and said a feather was just a bird that hadn't finished leaving. I told him that was rubbish. He held the real one up to the light, a wind came off the water, the vane shivered, and a fine spray of ink-dark flecks came loose and turned, very quickly, into birds above the wall.

He went to our gran's in Hull the week after, and the tin stayed under his bed with its lid taped shut. In October I finally opened it. The feather was gone. In its place lay a single sheet of cartridge paper with a drawing of a feather on it, its edge lifting into six small birds, each one already turned towards the canal. I sat on the back step for a long time, watching the real swallows go over and counting them the way he used to.