Black and grey line drawing of a feather entwined with flowers, ferns and a small butterfly, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather, flowers and fern tattoo design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a large feather running diagonally up the centre, with a cluster of flowers, leaves and fern fronds along its left side. A small butterfly and a curled tendril sit near the upper right, with fine dots and tiny insects scattered around the base. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft grey shading in the feather barbs and petals on a plain white background.

Botanical Fine line Feather Flower Fern Leaf Butterfly Insect Tendril Poppy

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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

Hush now, and mind the flour on the step. Gran Idris swept the yard before the bells, same as her mother did, and she never once let the ovens go cold before the first loaf was out. That morning the sky over the Mill Lane roofs was still the colour of pewter, and the only sound was the slap of dough on the marble.

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Her nephew Tobias came in with a feather caught in his collar. A grey goose feather, long as a ruler, and he swore it had dropped from the sky onto the bins. Gran took it and turned it in the lamplight, and saw the barbs were combed fine as the teeth of a comb. She tucked it behind the till and said nothing, which for her was a whole speech.

By six the bakery smelled of burnt sugar and rain. A poppy had pushed up through a crack in the back yard, red as a struck match, and Gran cut it for the counter jar. A fern frond had come up with it, and on its underside clung a small blue butterfly, wings shut, like a thought it had not finished. Tobias wanted to brush it off. Gran said the fern had been reaching for the oven vent all winter, and the butterfly had come in for the warmth, and who were they to send a guest back out into the cold.

The first loaf came out at a quarter to seven. The sun cleared the chimney pots, and the butterfly lifted from the fern, circled the window once, and was gone. Gran put the feather in the old tin bread bin so it would not get crushed. Tobias still has it. He says the lightest things are the ones that come back to you, and the rest is just flour.