Black and grey shaded feather tattoo on the upper arm of a woman wearing a white vest top and layered gold necklaces.

Feather on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather runs vertically along the upper arm, with its quill, barbs and soft tufted base drawn in black ink. The shading uses grey tones and fine hatched lines to give the feather depth and a textured, lifelike surface. The photograph is cropped to the upper body against a plain pale background, with the tattoo as the clear focal point.

Upper arm Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gull that came to the boarding house on Harrow Strand had only one feather left in its left wing, and Mrs Tallis said that was the reason it stayed. Every morning it sat on the rail outside the scullery and watched the back door until someone threw it a crust. Her son Eli said it was waiting for the tide to bring its other feathers back. His mother told him the tide had nothing to do with it.

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In the spring the lodgers went out on the sands with their buckets and their hats, and the gull followed the surf line, pecking at the cast weed. One afternoon a girl from the room above the porch sat down beside the dunes and wept over a letter that had come by the second post. Eli saw her from the wall. He did not know her name, only that she had paid for a week and never once come down to supper. The gull walked up the sand and stood beside her shoe, quite still, as if it had decided something.

She did not thank it. She picked up the one grey feather lying in the marram grass and turned it over in her fingers, the quill stiff and the barbs soft at the base. Then she tucked it into her hat band and walked back up the slope to the house without looking behind her.

The gull stayed on the rail until October. When the frost came, Mrs Tallis found the feather lying on the scullery step, and she put it in the dresser drawer beside the spoons. She never learned where the girl had gone, and the gull was never seen again after the first hard wind, though Eli swore he saw a single wing above the breakwater, catching the light.