Black and grey feather tattoo running diagonally along the inner forearm of a person wearing a dark t-shirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large feather is tattooed diagonally along the forearm, with its quill running from the lower wrist area up toward the elbow. The feather is built from bold black strokes that separate the barbs, with pale skin left unshaded along the central shaft. The background is out of focus and shows a dark top and the person's body, with no face visible.

Forearm Feather

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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 relief boat leaves you on the landing with a crate of paraffin, two tins of mutton and the logbook, and by the time the launch is a smudge beyond the skerries you have already found the feather pressed flat between the August pages. It is a long primary, grey barred with black, its shaft pale as bone. Ruairi Gow, the keeper you've replaced, has written nothing about it, only the tide times and a line at the foot of each page: wind NNW, seas heavy, lamp trimmed at nine. You draw your thumb along the barbs and they lift apart like the rungs of a ladder.

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The gale arrives on the third night. The lamp gallery shudders, the glass hums in its frame, and at two in the morning the clockwork seizes with a sound like a dropped spoon. You climb with the spare mantle in your teeth and find the gear train fouled with a tangle of gull wing and salt. Clearing it takes an hour. Then you wind the weight by hand, turn after turn, counting under your breath the way Gow must have counted, and the beam sweeps out across the black water until it finds a fishing boat labouring in from the Sound.

At dawn the boat is in the lee of the rock and the crew are waving their caps. You go down to the log and write beneath Gow's last entry: lamp stopped at two, restarted by hand, wind still NNW. Then you slide the feather back between the pages, where the next keeper will find it and wonder what it marks.