Black and grey feather tattoo decorated with flowers and scrollwork, running along the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather with flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large feather runs the length of the forearm, its central shaft and barbs filled with flowers, leaves, scrollwork and scale-like shading. The linework is clean and bold, with fine hatching and stippled detail creating depth in the feather vanes. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on pale skin against a dark leather backdrop.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Feather Flower Leaf Scroll Fern Forearm

Find an artist for this

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 crate came up from the loading bay at ten past eleven, which was the first thing Dorrit noticed wrong. The Halloran Street Museum did not take deliveries after dark, and nobody had booked a drawing to be framed. She signed for it anyway, because the courier had a face like wet paper and wanted to be gone before the rain thickened.

Keep reading

Inside, on a bed of grey linen, lay a feather as long as her forearm. Its shaft was ruled with fine hatching, and its vanes were so densely worked that she had to bring the lamp close to see the fern fronds tucked between the barbs, the small five-petalled flowers, the curls of scroll that tightened when she breathed on them. Beneath it was a card in copperplate: For the restorer. Mind the shaft. It still grows at night.

She worked through until St Brannoc's struck three. Twice a barb lifted from the linen and settled again with a sound like a page turning. A flower she had thought was painted had a stamen of real silver thread, and a torn vane mended itself along the stitch line while she reached for the gum arabic. She stopped trying to explain it and simply kept her hands steady, the way her grandmother had taught her to handle wings that might still be warm.

Mr Penhallow found her asleep over the bench at seven. He looked at the feather, then at the card, and said quietly that the last restorer had been a woman who wrote her name in the margin of everything she touched. Dorrit woke to find a new flower opened near the tip, petals still damp. In the margin of the linen, beside the copperplate, someone had already written her name, and the feather, very slowly, turned its face to the window.