Six-panel collage of black feather tattoos, some with birds and script, on the ribs, shoulder, back, ankle and neck.

Feather tattoos in six placements

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A six-panel collage of feather tattoos on different parts of the body, with some panels showing small birds taking flight from the quill and one showing a line of script beside the feather. The linework is fine and the feathers are shaded in black and grey, with soft tonal gradients giving the plumes depth. Each photo is framed close to the skin, and the subject is the tattoo rather than the person.

Fine line Realism Ribs Shoulder Back Ankle Neck Feather Bird Script Dreamcatcher

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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

Pass that ladle over here, and mind the pan, it's been spitting since Tuesday. No, sit where the heat is. You'll want it for the tale, because it's a cold one, even if it's about a feather.

Keep reading

Forty winters back, on the coaster Ada Penrose, the boy who scrubbed my galley floor found a grey quill caught in the scupper grate off the bow. He brought it to me like it was a live thing. I dried it on the stove rail and it stood up straight and shook itself out, which feathers don't do unless they've got a reason. I put it in the tea tin, the brass one with the broken hinge, and that was the first mistake, because a thing kept in a tea tin will always want out.

Three nights on, we ran into the Gulf with the glass falling like a stone. The gulls stopped crying. Then the birds came, hundreds of them, dark as ash, settling on the rigging and the rail, and they weren't looking at the sea. They were looking at the tin. When the first green wave came over the bow they all lifted at once, and the sky went the colour of a slate roof, and every one of them carried a barb off that quill in its beak, the way you'd carry a message you couldn't afford to drop.

We rode it out. When the sun came up the sea lay down flat as a plate, and the birds were gone. Here, take the tin. Mind the hinge. Open it and see for yourself: one barb's missing from the left side, and no bird will ever tell you where it went.