Close-up of a fine line feather tattoo on the neck behind an ear, in black ink on pale skin.

Feather tattoo behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a single feather drawn in dark grey-black ink on the skin at the back of the neck, just behind the ear. The feather has a central quill and fine hair-like barbs, rendered with delicate, thin linework and soft shading. The composition is tightly framed, with the ear and dark hair softly blurred at the edges.

Fine line Neck 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

Mrs Pengelly kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Steps for forty winters, and she always said the feather was the only thing the sea ever gave back to her in good order. Found it on the sand below the chapel wall, she'd tell the lodgers over the mutton, a grey-brown one from a bird nobody on the coast could name, lying straight as a ruled line as if somebody had set it down to dry. She kept it in a tin of Brown's cough sweets on the dresser, under the spare keys.

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The summer the Harrowgate boy came to lodge, he was forever reaching for that tin. He was a clerk from the railway offices, all elbows and apologies, and he had a habit of tugging at his collar when he thought nobody watched. One wet evening she caught him holding the feather up to the window, turning it so the lamplight ran along the barbs. He put it back quick enough, but not before he'd asked her, very polite, whether a feather could be made to stay put if a person wanted it to.

She didn't answer him straight. She went to the kitchen and came back with the sewing scissors and a bit of thread, and she tied the quill into his hair above the collar, where the wind would have to work to take it. He laughed, and she didn't. Three days later the tide took the boy's trunk out past the breakwater, and the feather was still in the thread when they fished him out, though he'd gone to the Sunday train without it.

I'll tell you what I think, and then you can go up to bed. Some things the sea keeps and some it lets go, and it's never once asked me which I'd prefer.