Black and grey shaded feather tattoo with fine linework running along the inner forearm, against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather is tattooed diagonally along the inner forearm, with its quill running down towards the wrist. The barbs are drawn with fine lines and soft grey shading that gives the feather depth and a slight three-dimensional look. The background is dark and out of focus, with a strip of red fabric visible at the upper left, and the tattoo sits near the centre of the frame.

Fine line Realism Forearm Feather Quill

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

You find the feather at ten past three, lying on the lino outside bay four as if someone had dropped it on purpose. It is long and grey, its barbs so fine that the light from the nurses' station shows through them, and when you turn it the quill bends and springs back the way a pen nib does when you press too hard. Nobody on the night rota keeps a bird's wing in their pocket, so you tuck it into the pocket of your tunic and carry on with the drug round.

Keep reading

Mrs Carver in bed nine is awake, as she always is at this hour, counting the ceiling tiles between her drips. She asks what you have and you show her. She holds it up against the blue curtain and says her husband used to bring feathers home from the allotment, woodpigeon grey, and lay them along the windowsill in a row like notes of a tune he could never quite remember. She says it with the flat calm of someone who has been awake too long to need a reason.

You check her line, adjust the pump, write up the obs in the neat grid the ward manager likes. When you pass the window again the feather is on the sill, laid straight with its quill towards the glass, and you tell yourself the cleaner must have done it, though the cleaner left at eight.

At handover you mention it to the day sister. She glances at the sill, where two more grey quills now lie beside the first, and says the windows have been sticking since spring and birds get in. Then she asks whether Mrs Carver has talked about her husband lately. You say she has, and you gather the feathers into your palm, still light enough to forget they are there.