Small black and grey feather tattoo with fine shaded barbs on the inner wrist, below a grey knitted sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather tattoo on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather is drawn diagonally across the inner wrist, with a central shaft and fine, feathered barbs. The linework is delicate and the shading uses soft grey tones to give the feather depth. The skin is pale and the composition is an informal indoor photograph with a cluttered background and a grey sweater cuff at the bottom 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 queue at Harrow Bridge has thinned to two lorries and a man with a goat, and the light through the hatch has gone the colour of weak tea. You have been stamping passports for eleven years and you know the sound a thing makes when it is paper and when it is not. The thing that slides off the counter now, under your elbow, makes no sound at all.

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It is a feather, long as your palm, grey-brown and barred with a darker grey that fades to nothing at the tip. The shaft is still straight. Nobody in the queue has a bird on their coat. The man with the goat is watching you as though you have dropped something of his, so you pick it up and hold it to the lamp, and the barbs part and knit again the way a thing does when it has been living recently.

Your supervisor, Dobrin, wants the booth cleared by six. He says the feather belongs in the bin with the dust. You put it in your breast pocket instead, under the lanyard, and stamp the goat man's papers without reading the name.

Afterwards, when the shutter comes down, you walk the cold strip of tarmac to the river fence where the ferns grow through the wire. You open your hand. The evening wind comes off the water and lifts the feather, and it goes up, turning once above the barrier, then drops across the white line, the line you have guarded for eleven years, and lies down on the far side as if it had always been travelling that way.