Black and green feather with the script words Angels watching over me, two pink flowers and ink splatter on a white background, shown as a tattoo design.

Feather with script and pink flowers

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A black and dark green feather with white highlights runs diagonally across a plain white background. The script words Angels watching over me are written along the pale centre of the feather, and two pink flowers sit at its upper and lower ends. Fine ink splatter spreads from the top of the feather, and the shading is smooth with soft tonal blending.

Botanical Feather Flower Pink flower Script Ink splatter Quote Angel

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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

Tomas Keel had carried post over the Hollin Pass for nineteen winters, bringing letters from the valley office up to the shepherds' huts above the snowline, and in all that time nobody had ever sent him a letter written on a feather. The envelope was addressed in a looping hand to Mrs Agnes Rook, care of the hut at Scarr Gate, and the stamp was the old queen's head, half torn away. He turned it over twice before the wind took his hat and he had to chase it across the scree.

Keep reading

By the cairn at the top he stopped to get his breath, and the sky to the west had gone the colour of wet slate. The rules said he should check every packet for damp, so he opened it there. Inside lay a single black feather, its pale vane lettered in careful copperplate: Angels watching over me. Beneath it, pressed flat, were two pink flowers from some lower garden, browned at the edges but still holding their colour. There was no name and no signature, only the words and the flowers.

He thought of the hut at Scarr Gate, where Agnes had lost her son in the thaw two springs gone, and of how she had stopped coming down to the village for her post. He did not know who had sent the thing. Perhaps the schoolmistress had written it out for a child and the child had mislaid it. He tucked the feather back in, weighted the envelope under a stone on the cairn, and started down the far side because the light was failing and the path was bad.

Next week he came up again with the tea and the flour, and found the envelope gone from the stone. At Scarr Gate the door stood open and Agnes was sitting on the step with her hands in her lap, the black feather laid across her palm. She did not look up when he came in. She only said, very quietly, that the words were in her husband's hand, and that she had not seen that hand in twenty years.