Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather tattoo on the inner wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather is tattooed diagonally across the inner wrist, its quill running down towards the hand. The feather is rendered in solid black ink with soft grey shading along the barbs, and the outline is crisp. The photograph is taken at a slight angle, with the hand raised against a patterned rug and wooden floor, and the tattoo sits in the lower centre of the frame.

Forearm Feather Quill

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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

Sit down, you, and mind the bucket. I'll tell it the way old Ferris told it to me, and he had it from the purser himself, so it's as true as tar. Fifty-one days out of Liverpool, the year the Hesper went round the Horn, and the ship's clerk, a thin fellow called Amos Penhale, had nothing left to write with but one quill he'd pulled from a gull that fell into the rigging off the Azores.

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He kept it in a tin box with his letters, and every night by the binnacle lamp he cut it fresh and wrote up the log in a hand so small the captain needed a glass to read it. The ink went grey in the cold. The sea got into everything, the paper, the biscuit, the men's tempers. But Amos never once missed his line, and when the wind died off the Horn and the sails hung like wet washing, he wrote to his mother in Penzance every night all the same, folding each page into the tin.

When they raised Valparaiso at last, the mother had died in March, and the letters were never sent. Amos had meant to post them from port, then meant to post them from the next, and nothing ever came back across the water. Ferris swore the quill was still in the tin when the purser opened it on the quay, with a crooked smear of soot along one side where Amos had rubbed it on his sleeve for luck.

The tin went to a pawnbroker on Fore Street, and the last anyone heard, the quill was still lying on top of the folded pages, waiting for a hand that would never come back for it.