A shaded black and grey feather sleeve tattoo covering a man's upper arm and forearm, with his hand resting near his shoulder.

Feather sleeve on upper arm and forearm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full sleeve of overlapping feathers covers the upper arm and forearm, drawn with fine dark outlines and soft grey shading that gives each feather depth. The feathers are arranged in layered rows that follow the curve of the arm, and the shading is strongest along the edges of the quills. The subject wears a light grey t-shirt and camouflage trousers, and the photograph is taken in dim lighting.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Feather Wing Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been at the Hollin track all week, so Mam sent me the long way round with the basket, past the sawpit and the charcoal burner's shed, where the pines close over the path until the village is only a bell and a smell of woodsmoke. I was counting the stiles when I found the wing.

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It lay under a holly, half-hidden in bracken, and it was bigger than my arm. Every feather overlapped the one below like slates on the chapel roof, each dark at the tip and pale at the root, with a line of shadow down the quill where the light had not reached. I knelt in the wet and laid them out one row at a time, the way Aunt Ida taught me to lay out goose quills for the magistrate's clerk, and by the time I had finished I had forty-one feathers and a bruise on my knee.

Aunt Ida would not cut them. She turned the wing over in her lap by the range and ran a thumb along the edges, where the shading was heaviest, and said a bird that size had been flying above our trees since before the chapel had a roof. Buzzard, she thought, or something larger that had lost its way from the moor. She would sell nothing from it. She wanted it kept whole.

I set it on the windowsill that night and forgot it. In the morning the back door stood open, and the wing had shifted, every feather lifted a fraction and all of them turned towards the forest, as though the bird had only paused to consider whether it would come back for it.