Black and grey feather tattoo running across the top of a bare foot towards the toes, with white painted toenails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather tattoo across the top of a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a bare foot showing a single feather tattoo that runs diagonally from the ankle area towards the toes. The feather has fine, sketchy outlines with soft grey shading along its vane and a darker shaft. The plain dark background and warm skin tones keep the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Other Feather Foot Toe

Find an artist for this

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 boat from Skerra came in on a Tuesday with the wind behind it, and my brother was not on it, which meant the letter had gone astray again. I had been waiting nine weeks for the wool and the lamp oil and anything else the mainland cared to remember us for. I walked down to the slip with the dog and stood where the gulls were fighting over a crab shell, letting the sacks go past me one by one.

Keep reading

Among them was a grey parcel no bigger than a hymnbook, addressed in Mother's square hand to Ishbel Macrae, Eilean Beag, care of nobody in particular. Inside, folded between two sheets of newsprint from March, was a pencil drawing of a single feather. It was longer than my forearm was wide. The artist had started with a faint outline, then worked the vane with soft strokes of grey until it seemed to lift off the paper. The shaft was darker, pressed harder, as if whoever held the pencil had been afraid of losing it.

I knew the hand before I knew the picture. Mother drew like that when I was small, sitting at the kitchen table while the kettle ticked, teaching me that shadow was only light that had decided to rest. I had not seen her draw in six years. There was no note, only the feather and a faint thumbprint at the corner where she had held it.

I pinned it above the stove that night, beside the calendar I had stopped turning. In the morning the wind came through the cracked pane and lifted the page at its edge, so that for a moment it seemed the feather meant to go somewhere, and I let it.