Black and grey realism style feather tattoo running diagonally across the side ribs of a torso.

Feather tattoo on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather is tattooed diagonally along the side of the ribcage, with the quill curving down towards the waistband. The shading is soft and layered, with fine hatched strokes defining the barbs and darker ink at the feather's base. The image is a close crop of bare skin, with a grey patterned top draped over one side and dark trousers at the lower edge.

Realism Fine line Ribs 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

Pull your stools in under the awning, the rain's coming sideways off the Cutting and it'll swallow my voice if you let it. This was the winter the canal froze to the lock gates, and the stallholders were packing up before four because nobody buys fish in a downpour.

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A boy called Tobias Greave found a feather on the towpath that morning. It was long and dark, the quill bent like a question mark, and he carried it to Mrs Ruddock's tea stand where the urn hissed and the mugs had chips in them like bitten biscuits. She turned it over in her red fingers and said a feather that bends has been flying into weather. Keep it dry, she told him, and it will remember the wind for you.

So he kept it inside his coat through three winters. He kept it through the summer the knife trade dried up and his father stopped speaking, through the flood that took the eel pens, through every morning he stood at the rail deciding whether to go home or keep walking. The rain never got through to it. Each night he unbuttoned his coat to check, and each night the barbs were still fanned out, combed clean by nothing but his own breathing.

On the fourth winter he took it to the rail above the frozen lock and laid it across his palm. The wind came up the cutting and lifted it straight off, and the feather climbed past the chimney pots as though it had somewhere better to be. Mrs Ruddock, who had come out to watch, said nothing at all. And that, my dears, is why the knife-grinder on Saltergate Row still leaves his shutter up in the rain, in case something comes back down.