Black and grey tattoo of a feather with a white bird silhouette at its tip, shaded across the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather with bird silhouette on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A long feather runs up the forearm, with a bird silhouette left pale at its tip and wispy barbs shaded in grey. The linework is soft and the shading builds depth along the quill and plume. The skin is photographed against a dark leather chair, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Realism Forearm Feather Bird Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hang your wet coats on the hook by the door, and mind the drip, for the snow has found its way under the eaves again. Settle yourselves. I'll tell you about the quill the Mallory boy pulled from the chapel roof the winter the bell cracked, for it's the one thing in this valley the snow never managed to bury.

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It was grey as wood ash and longer than a man's forearm, and its barbs were so fine they shivered whenever the wind came through the nave. Nobody could make it write. The ink beaded on the nib and rolled off like rain off a slate. But young Tobias had been taught his letters by the vicar, and he had a notion that the feather wanted a name rather than a word. So he sat in the cold pew with a candle stub and wrote the names of the dead from the parish register onto the oak of the chapel door, one by one, from the oldest to the newest.

Every name he wrote, something lifted from the plume. Grey shapes rose off the shaft like moths, and at the very top, where the vane splits, a single swift stayed behind, pale as a paring of moon. He wrote on until his fingers went numb, and the last name was the one he had been afraid of, his father's, lost on the Kestrel off the Skerries the autumn before.

When the thaw came the bird left the feather at last and went north over the moor, and the quill lay in the nave with its shaft clean and bare. Tobias never saw it fly. But if you go up to the chapel tomorrow, the door still holds the names, and the snow has never once settled on the lintel above them. Now, who wants the last of the cider before I start on the ghost of the miller's wife?