Collage of a feather tattoo on the hip and side of the torso, shown as a purple linework stencil and as a finished piece in black, pink and blue.

Feather tattoo on the side of the hip

Other · Mixed · Photo

The collage shows three views of one feather design. The top left image shows a purple linework stencil with black shading on the skin, while the other two show the finished tattoo on the side of a torso in black, pink and blue. The finished feather has soft, blended colour washes behind a dark, detailed quill, with the pink and blue fading into the skin.

Other Feather Stencil

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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 frost has taken the top skin off the yard by the time you reach the gate, and the geese are still shut in the barn, complaining. Your father's flask sits on the post where he left it. Beside it, pinned under a flint, is a grey-brown feather, its quill black and sound, its vane split where the gate or a fox has had it.

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You carry it to the kitchen the way you'd carry an egg. Your mother is at the range with the kettle, and she says it's from the goose that went over in October, the one that called all night from the top field. You hold the feather to the window. Where the low light catches the barbs they turn a colour you have no word for, a bruise of violet that thins into rose, as if the cold had got into the feather and started to bleed.

All week you paint what you remember with a jam jar of water and two tubes of school watercolour. Blue runs down into the dark quill, pink climbs up from the base to meet it. The first attempt looks like a flag left out in rain. The second looks like the feather itself, lifting off the paper.

On the last morning of the frost the geese cross the farm in a ragged line, and the one that lost its feather is among them, lighter on the left wing. You stand at the gate with the painting folded in your coat and watch until the line is only a smudge over the hedge, and then you go in and tell your mother the goose is fine.