Black and white photo of a fine line feather tattoo in pale ink running along a forearm.

Feather tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A long feather with a central shaft and fine barbs runs diagonally along the forearm, from near the wrist towards the elbow. The design is drawn in pale, light-toned linework with soft shading along one edge, so it reads as lighter than the surrounding skin. The black and white photograph is taken at an angle against a plain background, with the arm filling most of the frame.

Fine line Forearm 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

The feather came up past the fourteenth floor on the back of the wind the morning after the storm, and it caught on my balcony railing as neatly as if someone had posted it. The pigeons on the bins had been shedding grey for a week, but this one was long and pale, the shaft clean, the barbs combed back as though it had been pulled through a narrow gap. Nothing on Carrow House was that size. I unhooked it and carried it inside by the quill, the way my mother once carried a gift from the church.

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I stood it in a jam jar on the windowsill, where it kept the afternoon light and gave some of it back. Mrs Achterberg from fifteen came up at teatime to complain about the lift again, saw it and said a wing that big meant a gull had come inland. Her grandson said the gulls off the river were getting bolder, going for the crusts we scatter on the car park. She said it like a warning. I said I hadn't seen a gull on Carrow in twenty years, and she said that was exactly what a gull would want me to think.

That night I went out to check the railing and found a second feather wedged under the flowerpot, identical, shaft and all, as though something had come up the building looking for its pair. I pictured the two of them laid side by side on my kitchen table and could not say whether that felt like company or like evidence. I sat with both of them until the streetlamps below had changed colour twice.

In the morning I kept one and opened the window onto the wind. I held the other out over the drop and let go. It turned once, caught the light the way water does, and went down past the floors of other people's lives until I could no longer tell it from the litter in the car park.