Black and grey feather tattoo running along the side of a finger on the back of a hand with mint green nails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather tattoo along the side of a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a hand with a feather tattoo running along the side of one finger. The feather has a dark shaft, fine radiating barbs and soft grey shading. The hand rests on white paper towel, with mint green nails and a wristband visible at the top edge.

Hand 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

You find the feather at low tide, caught in the weed beside the slipway at Porthkennack, where the net-loft lamps are still burning at six in the morning. It is a single primary, as long as your forearm, its shaft dark as wet slate and its barbs so fine that the wind cannot quite decide which way to lift them. Nobody on the quay will say what bird it came from. Old Jory Penhale turns it over with a mending needle and says only that a fulmar goes where the herring go.

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Back in the loft you hang it on the nail above the tar barrel, under the column of boat names chalked on the beam. Eleven this winter, most of them rubbed half away by sleeves. You ask Jory why the sea keeps a feather when it keeps so little else. He shrugs and says a feather is what a bird leaves behind when it has decided to come back, and you laugh, because he is not a man who makes jokes and you are not sure he was making one.

The next morning the nail is empty. Jory has gone out alone in the Ada May because the glass is steady and the shoal has come in close. You stand on the slipway until the mist lifts off the harbour mouth, and then you see the feather pressed flat under a stone on the harbour wall, its barbs combed neat as if someone has drawn a thumb along them, one way and then the other.

Beside it, in Jory's square capitals, someone has chalked two words on the granite: GO ON. You tuck the feather inside your oilskin, where it lies against your ribs like a folded letter, and you walk down the slipway to the boat.