Black fine line feather tattoo on the upper shoulder of a woman wearing a white lace top, seen from behind.

Feather tattoo on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large feather is drawn in black ink along the upper shoulder, curving from the top of the shoulder down towards the upper arm. The engraved-style linework builds the barbs and central shaft with fine hatching and dense strokes. The tattoo is the only colour in the photo, set against pale skin, a white lace top and a plain light background.

Fine line Shoulder Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Haddow had been cutting the same ostrich plume into the copper for three weeks, and the plate still looked like a fern that had lost its nerve. He sent me to the back room with the lamp and a pair of spectacles that pinched, and told me to stop breathing on the burin. My job was the hatching: fine parallel lines, each a hair's width from the last, so the eye would take them for softness. Shadow, he said, is only many small obediences.

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The plume had come from Mrs Ellery's hat box, a gift from a cousin who had been to Cape Town and never forgiven the heat. It was as long as my forearm and curved like a question. Every morning I laid it on the baize, lifted the barbs with a camel hair brush, and tried to remember which way the light had fallen the day before. Mr Haddow would not let me use the original twice. He said a copy of a copy grows tired.

On the Thursday the plate printed clean for the first time. He pulled the proof and held it to the window, and the shaft ran true from quill to tip, the barbs lifting at their edges as if a draught had just passed. He said nothing for a long while. Then he folded the proof in three and slid it inside his waistcoat, and I understood he was not keeping the plate at all. He was keeping what I had done with the hatching.

The next morning the plume was gone from the baize. Mrs Ellery's cousin had come for it before the post. In its place lay a single real barb, grey and fraying at the tip, with a note in Mr Haddow's cramped hand that said only: for the lamp. I still keep it in a tin with the spectacles, and I still breathe carefully when I work.