Black and grey fine line feather tattoo with a small initial at the quill, sitting on the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather tattoo on lower back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A feather curls diagonally across the skin, with its quill ending in a small initial letter below. The linework is fine and delicate, with soft grey shading along the barbs to give the feather depth. The ink is in black and grey tones against a plain, lightly lit background of skin.

Fine line Realism Back 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

Sit down there, where the box hedge has gone soft at the edges, and mind the wasp by your knee. Nobody else in this village knows what the postman's daughter did with the goose feather, so I'll tell it once and you can argue with my grandmother about it later.

Keep reading

Her name was Ada Penhallow, and she had a quill she was not allowed to use, because her father kept the ink for the parish books and counted every drop. So she wrote her letters out here among the foxgloves, with feathers she pulled from the gate-post where the wind left them. She wrote to a boy on the far side of the estuary, a boy who sold eels and could not read. Every letter opened with a capital A curled like the top of a fern, and she signed each one with a single initial at the bottom, a little hook of a J that she said was the handle of a basket.

The boy never answered in words. He tied a grey feather to the hedge gate each Sunday, and they came in order, the first long and bent, the last short and worn down to the quill. Ada read the whole row like a sentence. When the final one arrived, bent almost double, she understood he had been waiting all that time to learn the alphabet from her, one barb at a time.

So they married, and the feathers went into the parish book, and that is why, if you walk the path to the mill tonight, you will still find the gate-post dressed in grey. Mind the wasp.