Black botanical feather tattoo centred on a woman's upper back, seen from behind above a white lace top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather tattoo on the upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A dark, solid black feather or fern frond sits vertically along the centre of the back, following the spine. Its leaflets are drawn as tapering, evenly spaced shapes with a clean silhouette and no visible shading. The photo is taken from behind against a white lace top and a pale skirt, so the ink is the only dark element in the frame.

Botanical Back Feather Fern Leaf Spine

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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

Nell had been counting the feathers for three nights, because Mr Calloway had sold the last of the costume trunks to a dealer in Doncaster and the ostrich plumes were all that remained of the Silver Pavilion. They lay in a biscuit tin on the wardrobe bench, grey with damp, the good ones kept apart from the moulted ones. Nine hundred and twelve. She had been told forty would do for the finale.

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The ground was rained out again. Outside, the big top stood half-struck in the field behind the services, its canvas sagging where the centre pole had come down for the last time. Calloway came in with his cap in his hands and asked whether she had found the fern. He meant the frond from the 1931 programme, the one the family had used as a trademark, cut from a stencil and painted on every poster from Carlisle to Penzance. The printer in Hull still had the plate. Nobody had the real thing.

She found it at first light, at the bottom of a hatbox under a stack of tax letters. It was a single long plume gone the colour of weak tea, its quills tapering to a point, each barb spaced as evenly as the teeth of a comb. Someone had pressed it there years ago and forgotten. She held it up to the window and the light came through the leaflets in a row of small doors.

She didn't tell him at first. She sat with it across her knees while the kettle boiled dry, thinking about the poster and the plate and how a thing can be copied so many times that the copy becomes the original. Then she wrapped the feather in tissue, then in a tea towel, and carried it out to the van where the lamp was already lit. Behind her the big top gave one long creak and settled into the mud.