Black and grey realism feather tattoo along the outer top of a bare foot, with small script on the toes of the other foot.

Feather tattoo on a foot

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of two bare feet on a tiled floor. A realistic feather with soft grey shading and fine barbs runs diagonally across the outer side of the left foot, toward the toes. Small script lettering sits on the top of the right foot near the toes, and both sets of toenails are painted black.

Realism Other Feather Script Foot Toe

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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 Abernethy had run the sorting office at Kirkby Lonsdale for thirty-one years and had never once been surprised by the post. So when a brown paper parcel arrived on the second Tuesday of September, addressed only to "whoever sweeps the tiles", she set it aside with her tea and waited until the van had gone. Inside, folded in tissue, lay a grey feather as long as her forearm, its barbs as fine as pencil shading, and a card in careful italic: Keep it dry. It is only borrowed.

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She knew the handwriting. Dorothy Pell had written the Christmas cards for the whole street since 1972, always in green ink, always on the same lined paper. Dorothy had been dead four years. The feather smelled faintly of the orchard behind her cottage, of windfalls and wet straw, and Mrs Abernethy found she had carried it out the back door before she had decided to.

The orchard was going over, late summer gone soft at the edges. Wasps worked the fallen Bramleys. Halfway down the rows, under the old Discovery tree, a jackdaw had left a single wing feather on the grass, as if it had dropped it in a hurry. She laid Dorothy's beside it. In the low light they were no different, and that was the joke Dorothy would have enjoyed, the one she never explained.

Mrs Abernethy walked back up the path with her shoes full of dew and found the green ink pen in her apron pocket. On the back of the card she wrote: Delivered. Signed for by the orchard.